[PJUG Javamail] challenges and gotchas, using multiple JNDI implementations.

[Michael Phoenix]

I thought I would share this with the group, in case you are ever in a
position of having to use multiple JNDI implementations because you are
using multiple application servers. We have a packaged application called
@task which has to run on JBoss, however we decided to use glassfish for our
custom web applications, because of the superior, free support.

We were getting that oddball class loader error for
org.jnp.interfaces.namingcontext on apps that used JTA and JDBC datasources
for hirenate or JPA even though I wasn't using that class in any of my
code.This class was also showing up in my error message when I neglected to
put the connector in my default domain /lib/ext folder.

JNDI  is used to provide a unified scheme to bind names to objects across
platforms. check here for details: http://java.sun.com/products/jndi/

Normally you can access the JNDI default implementation in an appserver by
simply creating a new initial context with a constructor with an empty
argument list like so:
new InitialContext()

However, we have to set the properties for the initial context when
we access the EJBs in the @task application which runs under JBoss to use
the JBoss implementation of JNDI, which is the class referred to above,
along with the JBoss JNDI URL. Apparently when you set those init context
properties in a piece of code and that code is executed, those properties
become the default, at least under glassfish. Therefore when you call an
initial context to access JNDI in glassfish you have to reset the properties
as follows
        props = new Properties();
        props.setProperty("java.naming.factory.initial",
"com.sun.appserv.naming.S1ASCtxFactory");
        props.setProperty("java.naming.provider.url", "iiop://127.0.0.1:3700
");
and create the initial context like so:
new InitialContext(props)

Furthermore, if you need to use datasources and connection pools, you need
to account for this in your persistence layer, because JNDI is how the
datasource is located by name. In Hibernate that means that for a situation
where you are using multiple implementations of JNDI, the optional JNDI
parameters become mandatory, and should be set like so:

    <property
name="hibernate.jndi.class">com.sun.appserv.naming.S1ASCtxFactory</property>
    <property name="hibernate.jndi.url">iiop://127.0.0.1:3700</property>
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