My latest project was moving a bunch of applications from running on WebSphere using Java 6 to running on Liberty running Java 8. For the most part this was pretty straightforward, but one major issue we ran into was a bean defined like so

<bean id="environment" class="org.springframework.jndi.JndiObjectFactoryBean">
  <property name="jndiName" value="java:comp/env/string/nw/environment" />
</bean>

What the heck does java:comp/env/string mean?

Turns out it’s pretty obvious once you know. It’s a JNDI Entry in Liberty (Namespace binding in WebSphere). You need to enter a new JNDI entry with a name of string/nw/environment with a value of dev, it, pt, prod, whatever your environment name is. This is generally something you’d add to a properties file, but considering this app is crazy old maybe that wasn’t an option.