I have the following environment set up: Java 1.5 Sun Application Server 8.2 Oracle 10 XE Struts 2 Hibernate I'm interested to know how I can write code for a Java client (i.e. outside of a web application) that can reference the JNDI datasource provided by the application server. The ports for the Sun Application Server are all at their defaults. There is a JNDI datasource named jdbc/xxxx in the server configuration, but I noticed that the Hibernate configuration for the web application uses the name java:comp/env/jdbc/xxxx instead. Most of the examples I've seen so far involve code like Context ctx = new InitialContext(); ctx.lookup("jdbc/xxxx"); But it seems I'm either using the wrong JNDI name, or I need to configure a jndi.properties or other configuration file to correctly point to a listener? I have appserv-rt.jar from the Sun Application Server which has a jndi.properties inside of it, but it does not seem to help. There's a similar question here, but it doesn't give any code / refers to having iBatis obtain the JNDI Datasource automatically: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39053/accessing-datasource-from-outside-a-web-container-through-jndi