gandralf/jndie

Simple JNDI Emulator

Purpose

JNDIe provides a (really!) lightweight JNDI environment/server to help software development, mostly for testing purposes.

Basic usage

• Put a mock-jndi.xml configuration file on your classpath.
• Add jndie.jar (and the other dependent libraries, like commons-digester and commons-beanutils) to your classpath. Or use maven: com.devx jndie 1.1 compile
• Add "-Djava.naming.factory.initial=com.devx.naming.MockContextFactory" to JVM.
• Have fun!

History

Origins and version 1.0

Work with EJB complexity and long development cycle times can be a pain, sometimes. Particularly if you need to do the code-deploy-try-fix cycle a lot of times.

That is what happened to me. On a specific task, I was spending more time on useless EJB aspects rather producing some useful code. On that task, I just needed to do a JNDI lookup to get a data source. No EJB specific thing was required. So, I made a context factory that could do lookups and return a data source. It was just a library, not a program that I need to run. I didn't have to deploy anything to do my tweaks and, for a time, I was happy.

It's codename was "JBoss Emulator Tabajara".

After a few days, I had to make that code be invoked by a session bean that I'd created, and I need to test that session bean. So, I had to return to the good and old code-deploy-try-fix cycle. So boring, slow and unproductive! I had to add some support to session beans to my library! And I did.

Some coworkers have liked, and asked me to add some other features, like:

• Basic transaction support.
• Check serialization on remote interfaces calls.
• Better configuration file.

Now this baby can run most of our systems. For example, on my development machine, our site (http://www.guiamais.com.br) runs without JBoss: tomcat with the "Tabajara" in WEB-INF/lib is enough. Of course, staging, pre-production and production environments run JBoss and tomcat.

After a few months I was invited to give a lecture about it. So I created jndie (or simple JNDI and EJB container emulator).

Version 1.1

In the 1.1 version, I ripped off the EJB stuff, as nobody uses this sh*t anymore.