Integrating heterogeneous information services using JNDI

The capability to announce and discover resources is a foundation for heterogeneous computing systems. Independent projects have adopted custom implementations of information services, which are not interoperable and induce substantial maintenance costs. In this paper, we propose an alternative methodology. We suggest that it is possible to reuse existing naming service deployments and combine them into complex, scalable, hierarchical, distributed federations, by using appropriate client-side integration middleware that unifies service access and hides heterogeneity behind a common API. We investigate a JNDI-based approach, and describe in detail two newly implemented JNDI service providers, which enable unified access to 1) Jini lookup services, and 2) harness distributed naming services. We claim that these two technologies, along with others already accessible through JNDI such as e.g. DNS and LDAP, offer features suitable for use in hierarchical heterogeneous information systems.