Marc Boorshtein wrote:
Yes you can use JNDI for most things. The point of my (too long
Before we shoot this thread in the head ;) : To be fair, other folks were doing exactly the same thing at the same time. For example Microsoft devoted resources to developing ADSI : also an API designed to abstract multiple directory services. Also not a success (much internal MS code reputedly uses the 'C' LDAP library they implemented as a copy of the UMich/Netscape/OL API).
Back then <puffs on his pipe...> it was not clear to everyone that the solution to heterogeneous connectivity problems would be to adopt a single common on-the-wire protocol. At that time most folk argued that this would never happen and instead it would be necessary to invent API abstractions. In fact, the single common protocol solution was adopted in most cases (SMTP for mail, LDAP for Directory, for example). This made the abstraction API both unnecessary and positively annoying.
