Head First EJB

But NO. You have to narrow the object as well!

Narrowing forces the object returned from the JNDI lookup to be absolutely, positively, something that implements the home interface. In other words, something you can cast to AdviceHome.

Context ic = new InitialContext();
Object o = ic.lookup("Advisor");
AdviceHome home = (AdviceHome) PortableRemoteObject.narrow(o, AdviceHome.class);