Dispatch

The process of accepting/fulfilling a request and returning a response is called a dispatch.

With Ice, an object adapter is the entry point into dispatches: in order to accept requests from clients, you need an object adapter.

Dispatching requests and returning responses is the primary activity of server applications.

An object adapter sits at the boundary between the Ice runtime and the server application code and has two main responsibilities:

• Accept connections established by clients. The clients establish connections to the endpoint or endpoints (network addresses) configured on the object adapter.

• Dispatch incoming requests received from these clients. While these requests are often received over the network connections accepted by the object adapter, they can also come from local callers (collocated invocations) and from outgoing connections attached to this object adapter (bidirectional callbacks).

Each object adapter belongs to exactly one communicator (but a single communicator can have many object adapters). Each object adapter has a name that distinguishes it from all other object adapters in the same communicator.