Bonobo Activation is nothing but a daemon implementing a set of CORBA interfaces. These CORBA interfaces implement a Name service for the set of CORBA servers installed on your system. Basically, OAF knows about all the CORBA servers of your system, running or not. The OAF daemon will activate those servers if you ask for them.

The Bonobo Activation daemon features a powerful query langage which allows you to ask for certain services rather than for certain applications.

C programmers who wish to access these services do not need to make raw CORBA calls: they can use a set of convenience functions implemented in the liboaf library. This library acts as a wrapper on top of the CORBA server. The API documentation for the liboaf library is available there. (XXX: add pointer to the API ref).