You have the option of sticking common war jars in the ear/lib directory - all subdeployments would then have access to those jars. Jars specific to each war should go in the war/WEB-INF/lib. Those lookups seem to complaining about not having a jndi name to bind against. I'd say first figure out the classloading first and the lookup errors last - if it isnt properly loading your spring jars it might try to load your classes as ejb based classes.