Ok, I made progress and got it to "work", but it's not 100% of what I was hoping for. Here's what I did, maybe there is a way to improve on it to obtain my ultimate goal. 1. I packaged all of the applications into their own ear files, with loader-repository entries in jboss-app.xml. 2. I switched from local interfaces to remote 3. I needed to include the server classes (ClientEJB) as well as the client classes with the web application. 4. I tested this setup with a portlet and also a full webapp. I was able to hot deploy any piece(s) that I wanted without affecting operation of the others. The only drawback is that I needed to have all the server classes in the client applications. I'm guessing that I didn't have to do this with my EJB2.1 application because I was actually dealing with proxies for the home & local/remote interfaces. At some point I'll test to see if I actually need the loader-repository entries or not. Thanks again for the assistance. Let me know if you have better ideas for how to accomplish what I'm looking for. Gary. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3961138#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...