The resource service must be started when Java EE components require access to an external Enterprise Information Systems. The standard way to do this is to use a third party software component called Resource Adapter.

The role of the Resource service is to deploy the Resource Adapters in the JOnAS server, i.e., configure it in the operational environment and register in JNDI name space a connection factory instance that can be looked up by the application components. The resource service implements the Java EE Connector Architecture 1.5^[6].

Resource Adapter are packaged in Java EE rar archives.

In development mode, as all other Java EE archives rar archives can be deployed automatically as soon as they are copied under $JONAS_BASE/deploy and undeployed as soon as they has been removed from this location.

For more information see Section 2.4.3, “depmonitor service configuration”.

The other ways to deploy rar archives is

A JOnAS specific resource adapter configuration xml file must be included in each resource adapter. This file replicates the values of all configuration properties declared in the deployment descriptor for the resource adapter. Refer to Defining the JOnAS Connector Deployment Descriptor in J2EE Connector Programmer's Guide for additional information.

Here is the part of jonas.properties related to resource service:

###################### JOnAS J2CA resource service configuration
#
#  Set the name of the implementation class of the J2CA resource service
jonas.service.resource.class org.ow2.jonas.resource.internal.JOnASResourceService

The worker thread pool used for all J2CA 1.5 Resource Adapters deployed can be configured in the Section 2.4.22, “wm service configuration” service.

resource service is mainly used in JOnAS for accessing databases via a JDBC resource adapter (in this case it replace dbm service) and for providing JMS facilities.

JOnAS provides several JDBC resource adapters and a JMS resource adapter on top of JORAM More information about configuring resource adapters can be found in Section 2.6, “Configuring JDBC Resource Adapters”