A session in Universal Messaging represents a logical connection to a Universal Messaging Realm. It consists of a set of session attributes, such as the protocol and authentication mechanism to be used, the host and port the message server is running on and a reconnect handler object.

Most of the session parameters are defined in a string that is called RNAME and resembles a URL. All the sample applications provided use an RNAME Java system property to obtain the necessary session attributes. The following section discusses this in further detail. The RNAME takes the following format.

The RNAME entry can contain an unlimited number of comma-separated values each one representing an interface on a Universal Messaging Realm.

The current version of the Universal Messaging Realm and the Universal Messaging client API supports 4 TCP wire protocols. These are the Universal Messaging Socket Protocol (nsp), the Universal Messaging HTTP Protocol (nhp), the Universal Messaging SSL Protocol (nsps) and the Universal Messaging HTTPS protocol (nhps). These wire protocols are available wherever a connection is required, i.e. client to Realm and Realm to Realm.

See the section Communication Protocols and RNAMEs for more information on RNAMEs and communication protocols.