Yes it does use its own context loader..dumb question..new to spring so please bear with me...so does "bootstrap" mean that the snowdrop deployer actually deploys the beans in the spring archives in dropped in /deploy as "services" accessible from jndi..to all other deployments..whereas the spring beans inside a .war are not (ie just libraries)...but the snowdrop deployer seems to scan/find all -spring.xml files in the /deloy directory??....again just started learning Jboss-spring..thnx