Welcome to my world.

I encountered a situation where I needed some simple Strings accessible to all my applications in glassfish. If you need environment variables in a single web app, it’s as easy as editing web.xml. However I’ve separated my application into several web and ejb modules for manageability concerns, thus I needed to set variables in the application server. I decided to create a Factory that returns a Hashtable of properties one can set in the application server. For this I run on Glassfish 2.1.1; I have not tested it with any other container though I do not see why it wouldn’t work.

Required Files

First the files. You’ll need the following jar. Save it in your application server’s lib directory. On my machine that is C:\sun\appserver\lib.

JNDIObjectFactory.jar

There are two classes in this jar:

com.ebleenterprises.naming.HashtableFactory
com.ebleenterprises.naming.StringFactory

Setting Up Glassfish

Start glassfish and log in to the admin console.

Navigate to Resources -> JNDI ->Custom Resources.

Add a new resource, you can use the type java.util.Hashtable or java.lang.String.

Now specify the factory class that corresponds with the type, either com.ebleenterprises.naming.HashtableFactory or com.ebleenterprises.naming.StringFactory.

Finally Add Properties. If you used the Hashtable it will return to you a hashtable of all the properties you specify. If you used StringFactory you will get back the first property you specify (if you specify more than one subsequent properties will be ignored). If no properties are set, in both cases you will get an Exception when accessing the resource.

Figure 1 below shows a sample setup for the HashtableFactory.

Accessing The Resources

Any application deployed to glassfish can then access the variables through a standard JNDI lookup:

javax.naming.Context ctx = new javax.naming.InitialContext();
Hashtable GlobalVars = (Hashtable) ctx.lookup("GlobalVars");
String name = GlobalVars.get("name");
String url = GlobalVars.get("url);

Or if you are using a Servlet, SessionBean, ContextListener, or other that supports injection you can use:

@Resource(name="GlobalVars")
Hashtable GlobalVars;