I got it working. Keys to the solution: el-*.jar must be in the ear and of course must be referenced in application.xml. I was trying a bunch of other things which gave me a bunch of other exceptions; once I did everything simpy, and just put the el-*.jars where they were needed, it worked. I should have used seam-gen, but I started this whole thing before that was functional, and now I have my own build.xml and everything else. Next time I will certainly start with seam-gen, which would cut out 95% of the messing-around-with-jars-and-xml problems which have consumed a substantial amount of my time on this project. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3996266#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...