JBoss.org Community Documentation
JNDI is a standard Java API that is bundled with JDK1.3 and higher. JNDI provides a common interface to a variety of existing naming services: DNS, LDAP, Active Directory, RMI registry, COS registry, NIS, and file systems. The JNDI API is divided logically into a client API that is used to access naming services, and a service provider interface (SPI) that allows the user to create JNDI implementations for naming services.
The SPI layer is an abstraction that naming service providers must implement to enable the core JNDI classes to expose the naming service using the common JNDI client interface. An implementation of JNDI for a naming service is referred to as a JNDI provider. JBoss naming is an example JNDI implementation, based on the SPI classes. Note that the JNDI SPI is not needed by J2EE component developers.
For a thorough introduction and tutorial on JNDI, which covers both the client and service provider APIs, see the Sun tutorial at http://java.sun.com/products/jndi/tutorial/.
The main JNDI API package is the javax.naming package. It contains five interfaces, 10 classes, and several exceptions. There is one key class, InitialContext, and two key interfaces, Context and Name