JNDI came out I THINK for J2SE 1.2.2 (lighting up my own pipe ;-)),
which came out in late 1999 I believe? Webservices was the latest buz
I suspect that JNDI, or whatever it was called back then existed way
before 1999
(I say that because I exited the LDAP business in late 1999 and I remember
a long running saga about whether Netscape and Sun could agree on a
single LDAP
Java API going on for a _very_ long time before that). Netscape began
developing
their Java SDK in 1997 with the aquisition of the Kwan brothers' company
(NCware).
That aquisition brought a number of people with LDAP Java experience
into the team.
Amusingly, the press release for that event is still on the Netscape web
site :
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease445.html
