"kahzoo" wrote : | The reason is, although the JNDI application programming interface is publicly defined by J2EE spec, the underlying communication protocol (between the JNDI server and client) is vendor specific, and if you need to connect to JBoss's JNDI sever, you need JNDI client classes which understand/talk the JBoss JNDI protocol. | [...] | Hope this helps. | It sure does, thanks a lot! :-) I do wonder, but perhaps this is not a question for this forum, why a JNDI connection to the Jboss AS directory can't be made without exposing the jboss-client-jar to the client application. I mean, it's also possible to provide authentication services to a Java EE application, without the application itself having to know about a particular authenticator. I.e. in Tomcat these are called realms and are defined at the servlet container level, not at the application level. The reason I'm asking is that I'm building an application where the dependencies should be as few as is reasonably possible. As much as possible should be defined at the servlet or AS level. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4151864#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...