I had some trouble with setting up JNDI support for jetty. Here is my solution. Hopefully someone will find it useful. jetty plugin for maven in pom.xml <plugins> ... <plugin> <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId> <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId> <version>6.1.5</version> <configuration> ... <jettyEnvXml>${basedir}/etc/jetty/jetty-env.xml</jettyEnvXml> ... </configuration> </plugin> ... </plugins> And jetty-env.xml itself is following <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Mort Bay Consulting//DTD Configure//EN" "http://jetty.mortbay.org/configure.dtd"> <Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext"> <New id="datasource" class="org.mortbay.jetty.plus.naming.Resource"> <Arg>jdbc/d