Glad I could help you out.
The thing is... from a command line your helper class can access LDAP because it does not have a 'neighbourhood bully' in it's way. Otherwise known as "the container", this bully may be getting in the way of your LDAP lookups when you run the helper class within the confines of a J2EE app.
I think you'll need to use JNDI, but not in a bad way. If you can get an 'LDAP Service Provider', then you are set. You simply specify a JNDI name for your LDAP directory in the 'Resource References' part of your app. (The reference implementation deploytool has 3 types of providers - a datasource, a JavaMail, and a URL provider). I think you would need an LDAP provider in this list...
Beyond that, I'm not sure where to find this provider or how to use it, or even if you can get the deploytool to recognize your new provider.
I am speculating for this entire post, by the way, but I did do a little reading on it. Ed Roman's book has a good section on this (Appendix B). I'd suggest snagging a copy in a bookstore or library and giving that appendix a quick glance. It's called: "Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans - and the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition" by Ed Roman.
It talks a lot about older specs of EJB (1.0), but it also has good general information.
I just saw this post as well:
http://www.javaranch.com/ubb/Forum11/HTML/000982.html [This message has been edited by Mike Curwen (edited June 08, 2001).]
