EJB lookup works in embedded OC4J but not stand-alone

Question

I use JDeveloper 9.0.3.1 to develop a combined web & EJB application. The EJBs are deployed on a 9.0.3 iAS server on a different machine.
The EJB lookup is in a helper class that's called by the servlet. For EJB lookup, I use the class "com.evermind.server.rmi.RMIInitialContextFactory" as described by the OC4J servlet guide (http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/A97688_10/generic.903/a97680/develop.htm#1003973). So my code looks like this:
Hashtable map = new Hashtable();
map.put(Context.INITIAL_CONTEXT_FACTORY, "com.evermind.server.rmi.RMIInitialContextFactory");
map.put(Context.PROVIDER_URL, "ormi://server:port/app-business");
map.put(Context.SECURITY_PRINCIPAL, "admin");
map.put(Context.SECURITY_CREDENTIALS, "password");
map.put("dedicated.rmicontext", "true");
InitialContext context = new InitialContext(map);
Object thing = context.lookup("MyEjb");
EJBHome feedback = (EJBHome)PortableRemoteObject.narrow(thing, "com.company.ejb.MyEjbHome");
The last insert into the map (map.put("dedicated.rmicontext", "true");) wasn't mentioned neither in the servlet guide nor the EJB one. But without it, I'd always get some "domain is null" error.
Now this code above works flawlessly in the embedded OC4J of JDeveloper. But it always hangs in the "Object thing = context.lookup("MyEjb");" line when executed either in a stand-alone OC4J (the one from JDeveloper launched through the batch file in [JDeveloper directory]\jdev\bin\start_oc4j.bat) or in the OC4J in iAS.
Does anybody know why this happens or how to fix it? I know that there are other ways of EJB lookup in servlets but since we also have plain Java classes for testing purposes that access EJBs, this seemed like the simplest thing to do for both Java classes and servlets.

Answer 1

I was referring to the java client case where this optoin is not required. In general for web clients one doesn't use the rmi initial context to find the bean. This is because the bean and the webclient are both packaged in the same application. One defines the ejb-ref in the web.xml for the bean and then looks it using the default initial context. Something like
Context ctx = new InitialCOntext();
ctx.lookup("bean ejb-ref-name");
However if you must use rmi for accessing the bean from the web client then the dedicated connection property is required.
For java clients you would setup the rmi context environment.
Since you are trying to use a common utility class for both java and webclient I would recommend that you look into packaging the java client as a j2ee application client. Basically in that case you would be able to define a ejb-ref in the aplication-client.xml and use the default initial context in code for both the cases.
Hope that helps
Dhiraj