Developing Applications That
Use a NICThis chapter describes how to develop an external application to interact with a network information collector (NIC).
If you are writing an external application that interacts with a NIC, you must include a NIC proxy in the application. The NIC proxy is a client-side library that communicates with a single NIC resolver via CORBA.
Typically, each resolution process in the NIC requires one NIC proxy. For example, the OnePopLogin sample data includes two resolution processes: mapping of a subscriber's IP address to the subscriber's login name and mapping of the subscriber's login name to the SAE reference. An application that uses both these resolution processes would require two NIC proxies (see Figure 11-15 in Chapter 11, Designing a NIC Configuration).
The NIC proxy provides a simple interface, the NIC API. You configure the NIC proxy to communicate with one resolver. For efficiency, the NIC proxy caches the results of resolution requests so it can respond to future requests for the same key without contacting the resolver.
The SDX software includes a factory interface, the NIC factory, to allow applications to instantiate, access, and remove NIC proxies.