Chapter 11: Writing Providers

Overview

This chapter is designed to give you an understanding of the types of provider typically supported by WBEM server implementations . Unfortunately, the DMTF standards define neither what types of provider should be supported by a WBEM server nor what interfaces they should provide although the emergence of the CMPI should resolve this.

Naturally, the types of provider and their interfaces that most implementations support correspond very closely with the intrinsic methods a WBEM client can invoke. For example, because a WBEM client can invoke the EnumerateInstances() intrinsic method (see Table 7.1 on page 129), we would expect to see a provider able to handle instances (an "Instance Provider"!) with an interface called something like EnumerateInstances() . We find exactly that: