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JNDI overview, Part 1: An introduction to naming services

Use JNDI to better manage your distributed applications

By Todd Sundsted, JavaWorld.com, 01/01/00

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Those of you who've been to a library and can still remember the experience may recall the process of locating a library book. If you aren't in touch with your antiquarian side, this situation will seem unfamiliar; but every once in a while I wander off to a local library to look for a genuine, offline book. Libraries are filled with thousands of the things -- they're dusty and made of wood pulp and cow hide, but they're fascinating in their own way. In any event, when the compulsion to find a certain one strikes, I avoid the naive course of walking up and down the library aisles searching for it and turn instead to the card catalog.

TEXTBOX: TEXTBOX_HEAD: JNDI overview: Read the whole series!

A card catalog, for the uninitiated, maps the names of books to their location in the library. By going to the card catalog first and looking up the book's location, I save myself a significant amount of walking. (Incidentally, I've heard that some libraries actually allow patrons to use computers instead of the card catalog. They've got it half right -- now if they'll just put the information in the books into the computer where it belongs...)

As surprising as it may seem, the notion of a card catalog is quite handy in the world of computing, as well. In computing, we call it a naming service, which associates names with the locations of services and with information. It provides computer programs with a single location where they can find the resources they need. In the way, programs don't waste time by performing the electronic equivalent of walking up and down the aisles, and don't require that the locations be hardcoded into their logic, either.

Finding resources is of particular importance in large-scale enterprise environments, where the applications you build may depend on services provided by applications written by other groups in other departments. A well-designed naming infrastructure makes such projects possible -- and the lack of one makes them impossible. In fact, many business-process reengineering efforts begin with the design and implementation of a robust, enterprise-wide naming and directory infrastructure.

This month, I introduce the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI). JNDI provides a common-denominator interface to many existing naming services. As such, JNDI was not designed to replace existing technology; instead, it provides a common interface to existing naming services. Let's begin by taking a look at some of these services.

An introduction to naming services

The figure below depicts the organization of a generic naming service.

A generic naming service

A naming service maintains a set of bindings. Bindings relate names to objects. All objects in a naming system are named in the same way (that is, they subscribe to the same naming convention). Clients use the naming service to locate objects by name.

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