Locators
In Terminology, we described briefly how the Ice runtime uses an intermediary, known as a location service, to convert the symbolic information in an indirect proxy into an endpoint that it can use to communicate with a server. This section expands on that introduction to explain in more detail how the Ice runtime interacts with a location service. You can create your own location service or you can use IceDiscovery or IceGrid, which are both implementations of a location service. Describing how to implement a location service is outside the scope of this manual.
A locator is an Ice object that is implemented by a location service. A locator object must support the Slice interface Ice::Locator, which defines operations that satisfy the location requirements of the Ice runtime. Applications do not normally use these operations directly, but the locator object may support an implementation-specific interface derived from Ice::Locator that provides additional functionality. For example, IceGrid's locator object provides access to an IceGrid::Query object so that applications can perform more sophisticated queries.