I believe it is related to CORBA in some way (I'm not sure). I'm curious as to its function and how it works. Google isn't helping me when I search for "IOR file", and I'm not sure what else I could search for. Thanks to anyone who can at least point me in the right direction with available resources.
An IOR file is a file which contains an Interoperable Object Reference which is a kind of a locator string. The IOR file itself contains the IOR. The IOR is an CDR encoded string which, depended on the CORBA version, contains various information regarding the servant who created this string. But basically it works as a locator string.
Inside the IOR normally an IP, portnumber and object reference of the servant could be found.
In a simple hello world example the servant (server) will create this file. The client reads this file and the client ORB (Object Request Broker) will delegate the call from the client to the servant transparently.
All about CORBA: OMG CORBA Website or just visit Wikipedia
IOR stands for Interoperable Object Reference and is related to Corba
You can check out "Corba in 5 minutes" here : http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/~ljosa/doc/encycmuclopedia/devenv/corba-index.html
There's a section explaining what is an IOR
IOR is a CORBA or RMI-IIOP reference that uniquely identifies an object on a remote CORBA server.
IOR can be transmitted in binary over TCP/IP via GIOP-IIOP (encoding may be big-endian or little endian), or serialized into a string of hexadecimal digits (prefixed by string IOR:) to facilitate transport by non-CORBA mechanism such as HTTP, FTP, and email.
To locate a server object at run-time, the client application requires a reference to it. This reference is called an Interoperable Object Reference (IOR). An IOR is a text string encoded in a specific way, such that a client ORB can decode the IOR to locate the remote server object. It contains enough information to allow:
- A request to be directed to the correct server (host, port number)
- An object to be located or created (classname, instance data)
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1087083/what-is-an-ior-file-what-does-it-do-and-how-does-it-work