Having gone through some of the trails in this tutorial, such as
The Basics 
trail, the
Java Objects and the Directory 
trail, or the
Tips for LDAP Users
trail, you probably have used some of the examples to
access or update data in a naming or directory service.
You were able to use these examples, or write programs of your own
that use the JNDI, even though you had very little detail about
the
name
argument that is used pervasively throughout the JNDI.
This is because the concept of a name is so ubiquitous
that we all share some common preconceived notions of what it is and how
to use it. The JNDI methods support such common notions and, for the most
part, treat names in an intuitive manner. Consequently, not much
discussion of how to specify a name is necessary.
This lesson covers the different types
of names and their uses in the JNDI.
It is intended for applications that need to
do more than just pass name parameters to methods.
The lesson first discusses of the use of
string names and structured names
and why the JNDI contains both.
It then describes the two different types of structured names:
composite
and
compound.
The last part shows how to
handle names that include special characters
and how to parse and compose
names.
See the
URLs 
lesson for a discussion of how URLs are treated as names in the JNDI.
