Thanks Jan, but I think I wasn't clear on a point in my question.
I can create and bind what I need to JNDI without all the classloader stuff in that test you referenced. What I was hoping for is class similar to WebAppContext that would allow Jetty to handle all of that for me. For instance, if I created Jetty instance with an arbitrary WebAppContext, and also a resource in my server code with something like new Resource(_server, "jndiName", myobject) then I would expect to have access to it within the webapp context without any explicit binding on my part because Jetty handles it. But again, I don't want use WebAppContext because my files won't be organized correctly. I'd rather use something like ServletContextHandler.
I saw that test you referenced before, but I didn't fully understand the ClassLoader stuff. I gather that creating a class loader is somehow creating an isolated java:comp space for working with JNDI contexts? It's good to know, but doesn't seem necessary here.
Was just hoping to skip creating JNDI contexts in my tests, but I guess I could refactor it all out to a class and hope I never have to look at it again...