Reverse domain name notation
 | This article relies largely or entirely on a single source. (May 2011) |
The Reverse-DNS is a convention for components, packages, and types naming systems. A characteristic of reverse-DNS strings is that they are based on registered domain names, and are only reversed for sorting purposes. For example, if a company making a product called "MyProduct" has the registered domain name "example.com", they could use the reverse-DNS-ish string "com.example.MyProduct" to describe it.
History
Reverse-DNS first became widely used with the Java platform, and has since been used for other systems.
Examples
Examples of systems that use Reverse-DNS are Sun Microsystems' Java platform and Apple's Uniform Type Identifier or UTI.
Example of reverse-DNS strings are:
- com.adobe.postscript-font (UTI string for Adobe Systems's PostScript fonts)
- com.apple.ostype (UTI string for Apple's OSType)
- org.omg.CORBA (Java library for CORBA)
- org.w3c.dom (Java library for W3C's DOM)
References
"Apple Developer Connection: Introduction to Uniform Type Identifiers Overview". 2005-11-09. Retrieved 2007-07-13.