The Essential Components

Implementing a Context Implementation

A context implementation is a class that implements the Context interface. It is the guts of a service provider, which is responsible for handling almost all of the requests submitted by the user program.

The user program accesses a context implementation in two ways:

• Indirectly via method invocation on the InitialContext class
• Directly via method invocation on Context instances, obtained by calls such as Context.lookup()

A context implementation must provide a definition for each method in the Context interface. These methods can be categorized as follows:

• Lookup
• List (Enumeration)
• Update
• Names (name parser and other methods that deal with names)

Details on how to implement these methods and miscellaneous tips are shown in the next sections.

The Essential Components