Naming: design pattern and framework

Abstract

Naming is an important, but frequently overlooked, aspect of software systems. Naming is usually combined with other issues, e.g. distributed communication technology. The paper treats naming in isolation. It presents a naming design pattern which abstracts several naming policies and an object-oriented framework that can be customized to support naming policies. An applications designer can choose the correct naming properties (relative, absolute, universal identifiers, etc.) to refer to specific objects.