Question

I would like to know about what is the relationship between JNDI and Spring?
Is spring an advanced version of JNDI? Both are used to create an object from string names.
Can we say that an For JNDI an application server is neccesary to provide naming service?
on the other hand for Spring we may not need Application server so it could be used at Java SE?

Finally where we can put JMX on this relation between JNDI and Spring? Is there some common logic at the low level?

Answer 1

Just to clarify some definitions:

• Spring: The Spring Framework is an open source application framework and Inversion of Control container.
• JNDI: The Java Naming and Directory Interface, a Java API for a directory service that allows Java software clients to discover and look up data and objects via a name.
• JMX: Java Management Extensions (JMX) is a Java technology that supplies tools for managing and monitoring applications, system objects, devices (e. g. printers) and service oriented networks.

JNDI is mostly a set of Java interfaces that define how a naming system should work in Java in such a way that a diverse set of services can be abstracted to a simple JNDI interface. For example, file systems, LDAP servers and DNS servers can all be accessed as a JNDI service.

Enterprise Java (Java EE) makes extensive use of JNDI to store objects in a common address where other services can find them by name. JNDI does not require an application server, but Java EE application servers almost always require (and provide) a JNDI service.

Spring is not a JNDI implementation, and does not require JNDI, but does support it, meaning that you can start a JNDI service in a Spring container, access JNDI based resources and use Spring’s built in JNDI support classes.

JMX defines a standard on how to provide management interfaces, instrumentation and runtime "transparency" to a Java application. There’s not much overlap between JNDI and JMX except that JMX remote connectors are frequently built in the form of java remote objects and bound into a JNDI service (so that remote clients can look them up and connect to a JMX managed application).

Spring does not require JMX but provides support for it in their framework libraries and this is frequently used as a simplified means of adding JMX based services to a Spring managed application or service.

It does not sound like you need JNDI, and as you say, if your application is going to be Spring managed Java SE based, you would have some fairly specialized requirement to call for JNDI.

As for JMX, Spring does make it fairly easy to add JMX "instrumentation" to your Spring managed Java SE application. My opinion: I feel (and could be wrong) that you need to develop a bit more expertise before tackling this as it could be a serious sidetrack for you.