How the Naming Environment and the Container Work Together

The application component's environment is used as follows:

• The application component's business methods access the environment using the JNDI interfaces. In the deployment descriptor, the application component provider declares all the environment entries that the application component expects to be provided in its environment at runtime.

• The container provides an implementation of the JNDI naming context that stores the application component environment. The container also provides the tools that allow the deployer to create and manage the environment of each application component.

• A deployer uses the tools provided by the container to initialize the environment entries that are declared in the application component's deployment descriptor. The deployer sets and modifies the values of the environment entries.

• The container makes the JNDI context available to the application component instances at runtime. These instances use the JNDI interfaces to obtain the values of the environment entries.

Each application component defines its own set of environment entries. All instances of an application component within the same container share the same environment entries. Application component instances are not allowed to modify the environment at runtime.