The NameServer is a basic part of the OpenEdge architecture. It maintains a list of available AppServers and WebSpeed Transaction Servers. Those servers register the application services that they provide with the NameServer. The NameServer can then direct client connection requests to a broker that supports a requested application service. This provides scalability and location transparency to your applications.

The NameServer can also provide load balancing and fault tolerance for OpenEdge server applications. Load balancing allows you to balance client workload among multiple brokers that support the same application service (that is, the same set of procedures and resources). This ability makes the NameServer very useful in deployed applications that handle large volumes of requests.

The NameServer works through the UDP network protocol. For various reasons, some network administrators might not want UDP on their networks. To accommodate this preference, the OpenEdge architecture includes a "No NameServer" connection procedure. If you employ the "No NameServer" connection procedure in a WebSpeed application, you must configure the WebSpeed Messenger to point directly to a specific WebSpeed broker. This approach can limit the scalability of your application. For more information, see Configuring WebSpeed.