As we noted in our last column about the Web as a distributed object infrastructure, names for objects are very powerful and necessary things. But naming objects is a subtle and difficult practice.
Names can have different kinds of characteristics, different capabilities, different uses.
Choosing the right type of namespace can greatly aid the design of a system. We believe that naming is an important and understudied problem in distributed object computing. In this column, we will be discussing namespaces in the World Wide Web, in the hope that the lessons learned from this very successful naming paradigm can be applied to distributed object systems. But before considering names in the particular context of computer systems, it is useful to step back and think of names in our common experience. The need to associate names with objects is an essential part of human thought.