The SOM Object Adapter is DSOM's standard object adapter. It provides basic support for receiving and dispatching requests on objects. As an added feature, the SOMOA and the server process's server object collaborate t automate the task of converting SOM object pointers into DSOM object references, and vice versa. That is, whenever an object pointer is passed as an argument to a method, the SOMOA and the server object convert the pointer to a DSOM bject reference (since a pointer to an object is meaningless outside the object's address space).