Basically the Lifecycle of EJB's (Session Beans etc) is controlled thru the container, but there's no similar "startup-hook" than the one you mentioned with servlets. And as far as I know there's neither a J2EE-Spec nor JBoss-Deployment-Descriptor-specific solution. If your "startup-hook" should just configure Logging or Hibernate, try to configure standardjboss.xml and jboss-service.xml to your needs. Or take a look at MBeans for bootstrapping some services (JBoss-specific) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3963445#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...