Mico is installed on the FreeBSD machines only (not on the CS machines).

The complete set of examples that come with the Mico distribution
can be found in /usr/local/doc/mico/examples. Two of these examples
are here, these are the two that are discussed in the manual
(account and account2).

IMPORTANT!!!! Use gmake (not make).

Linking is very slow (be patient).

---------------------------------------------------------

The Mico Manual is the file manual.ps. Chapter 3 is probably all you
will need (unless you want to do something fancy).

---------------------------------------------------------------- 
Here is a brief description of how you can handle the issue of getting your
first obejct reference when using Mico. This is also discussed in the 
Mico manual.

How does the client get an object reference to the server object?

There are a number of ways this can happen:

1. Server creates an object reference, converts to string and gets
this string to the client via memory or a file. 

        -Check out the "account" directory for an example of code that
        has the server and client in the same address space (within
        one process). The server creates and object and converts the
        object reference to a string, which is then used by the 
        object client.

        -Check out the first example in section 3.3.3 of the manual
        for an example that includes seperate client and server
        processes. The server process creates and object and saves a
        string representation of the object reference in a file. When
        the client starts it reads the client reference from the file


2. A naming service is used. This involves running a corba naming service
(as a separate process). Corba includes a specification for this service,
so any code that uses this is more portable than code relying on using the
file system to transfer object references.

Mico includes a naming service daemon called "nsd" that implements the Corba
Name Service. To use this service you have to:
        - run the daemon.
        - have the server register with the Name Service.
        - have the client query the Name Service, that is, to
        look up an object reference given a well known name.

BUT, we are (almost) right back to the initial question - how do we
get an object reference for the Name Service? There is nothing in the
Corba spec that details how this will happen, so we have to use
Mico-specific code. When using Mico you can use the Mico Binder -
which is pretty simple to use, but is not portable.  The general idea
is that Mico includes a simple naming service that is easy to use, and
that provides a mappings to object references from addresses and
repository IDs. Mico has it's own syntax for specifying these
addresses and IDs - see section 3.3.3 of the manual for the details.
Note that you don't need to run the Name Service Daemon nsd, this
simple naming service is built in. Look at "account2" in the examples
directory for sample code that uses the Mico Binder. Here is an overview
of what you need to do:

        Client: use orb->bind(name,address) to acquire an object reference.
        The "name" looks like this: "IDL:ObjectName:1.0" where ObjectName
        is the interface name and 1.0 indicates a version number. 
        The "address" looks like this: "inet:hostname:port" where hostname is
        the name of the host running the server and port is its' portnumber. 

        Server: enable IIOP on the server by specifying command line option
        "-ORBIIOPAddr inet:hostname:portnum". Note that in the server the
        call to ORB_init passes argv,arc in (this is how these options
        reach the ORB). hostname should be the name of the host you are
        running the server on and portnum can be any number you want (>1024).
        So starting the server might look like this:

    ./server -ORBIIOPAddr inet:monica.cs.rpi.edu:8765

        and assuming we are dealing with a Corba interface named "EmailDB" the
        client call to bind would look like this:

            CORBA::Object_var obj = orb->bind ("IDL:EmailDB:1.0", 
                "inet:monica.cs.rpi.edu:8765");