appreciate your comments.. few more clarifications.. this utility class is in EJB project. As I read resource-refs can only be placed per each EJB (only specific to a particular EJB/s) There is no way a genral resource-ref can be defined in ejb-jar.xml. If so, this resource-ref will only be visible to only EJBs where resource-refs are defined. So how a utility class in a EJB project looks up such a resource-ref? When looking up such resources, out of the following two way which is the best practise? lookup gicing full path ctx.lookup("java:comp/env/something/something"); or lookup giving only relative path ctx.lookup("something/something"); View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3987259#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...