I'm working on getting a bunch of standalone Tomcat servers to subscribe to a topic on a JBoss server. I've read numerous threads here about configuring a client to use JBoss' JNDI context (by specifying java.naming.factory.initial, java.naming.factory.url.pkgs, and java.naming.provider.url in jndi.properties) to allow them to get at JBoss' ConnectionFactory. The added complication here is that each Tomcat instance already has its own local JNDI context, which we need.

The generic solution I can see to this is to create my own javax.naming.spi.ObjectFactory implementation to use in Tomcat, whose getObjectInstance method will create an InitialContext for the remote JBoss server (using the properties mentioned above) and return whatever it gets from that Context for the JNDI name that was used to get the ObjectFactory locally. (So, looking for java:comp/env/topic/myLittleTopic on Tomcat will cause the ObjectFactory implementation to open up JBoss' context and return whatever it returns from a lookup of java:comp/env/topic/myLittleTopic.)

Does this seems sensible?

Also, this seems like something that has probably been dealt with before. Am I reinventing the wheel?

Any comments are appreciated. Thanks.

-john.