The good news is that I now have everything working. Thankyou Weston for your quick and helpfull replies. To recap: I have the -ds.xml and RAR inside the EAR. I am using isolated class loaders. IT doesn't seem to matter whether or not i turn on call by value in the naming service and ear deployer configs. The all in one EAR approach should mean its all call-by-reference anyway. What seems to be making or breaking it is the RAR reference in the -ds.xml: I am using: <rar-name>index-ra-test-0.1.ear#index-ra-0.1.rar</rar-name> and it is working with that. Using: <rar-name>index-ra-0.1.rar</rar-name> it will silently fail without binding the service to its JNDI name. I'm a little surprised by that, i thought the -ds.xml deployer would fail if it can't find the connection factory interface. Perahps all the ear# syntax is doing is prompting it to use the right clasloader? I've no idea. Any enlightenment on how to get the RAR working as a seperate modular deployment would still be appreciated and of general interest I think. For example, suppose I had EARs needing isolated loaders but want to share a single resource adapter between them? Rupert Smith View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3963049#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...