JNDI in JBoss

There are three levels of naming scope in JBoss:

- Name underjava:comp, only available to the application component such as EJB Bean1, Web application web1 etc. java:comp/env refers to as enterprise naming context (ENC)

- Names under java:, visible only within the JBoss server and not to remote clients

- Any other names, global visible, provided that the context or object support serialization.

With JNDI reference, it allows us to bind non-serializable object to JNDI. It actually only bind object reference to it and retrieve the object from an ObjectFactory based on the reference. Spring's BeanFactory is bound to JNDI in this way. The limitation is that the object is only available in the same JVM. Even a backend service is serializable, it doesn't make sense to bind it to JNDI directly, because the implementation class gets loaded to client side and unserialized.

A code snippet from JBoss's NonSerializableFactory

public static synchronized void rebind(Context ctx, String key, Object target)
       throws NamingException
   {
       rebind(key, target);
       String className = target.getClass().getName();
       String factory = (org.jboss.util.naming.NonSerializableFactory.class).getName();
       StringRefAddr addr = new StringRefAddr("nns", key);
       Reference memoryRef = new Reference(className, addr, factory, null);
       ctx.rebind(key, memoryRef);
   }