My previous post had a formatting error and was barely readable, so let me repost it: Ivan, <description>ParentBeanFactory="BillingFramework"</description> won't work in the JBoss Deployer, you need to use braces, but apart from that, it is a JBoss Deployer specific feature, and I don't think Mule (or for that matter any Spring context bootstrapping mechanism, other than the JBoss deployer) will recognize it. I'm not that familiar with the way Mule bootstraps their application context, but, generally speaking, in this case you want to retrieve the JBoss Deployer-bootstrapped application context from JNDI and set it as a parent for your new context (before the bean definitions are actually parsed and beans are instantiated, ideally in the constructor). This is what we do internally in the Deployer. So, I would look in Mule if it has a mechanism that allows you do do this. Marius View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4267909#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...