I came across an article by Bill Burke on this topic. http://docs.jboss.org/ejb3/app-server/tutorial/ear/ear.html)http://docs.j... "@EJB annotations are usable in servlets and JSPs, but unfortunately, we have not yet updated tomcat to support it. Also, Tomcat works with the old XML format so you cannot use XML either. So for now, you must lookup the EJB via its global JNDI name." It tells you how to use session bean reference from Servlet which will work with JBoss 4.0.x. I guess <ejb-ref> is for the legacy EJB 2.1 purpose and in 2.1, local & remote are mandatory. However, when I use NetBean 5.5 Beta2 to insert a Enterprise bean reference, it does add ejb-ref into web.xml so Sun has to address this issue. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3978518#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...