After reading some of the docs, i guess the reason why you are getting a null object for the entitymanger and the entitymanager factory, might have to do with the fact that these objects are meant to be used in a managed environment and hence are not available to the standalone client. That even explains why you are getting a NULL object (and not NameNotFoundException) during the lookup. P.S: This is just based on what i could find about entity managers and my previous experience on similar issue. Someone who might have a better understanding about EntityManagers might want to confirm this. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4101527#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...