I've been looking thru the (apparently, wrong) docs to find what methods JBoss will call on a service when it is first being deployed, and then undeployed.... like init and finalize methods.

Are there any such calls, and is there a formal way to access a parameter file in the deployment jar? I am not so keen on not having even a sparse common service API for all services.

Or, should one simply check for the initialization of globals to determine if it's the first time the service has been called to trigger initialization? E.g. I need to open a connection to a DB.

Any pointers much appreciated!

Thanks.