Performing:- http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/toplink/jpa/tutorials/jsf-jpa-tutorial.html I was experiencing issue with command $ ant -f build.xml generate-tables and had to create schema (createDDL.jdbc) through SQL/PLUS The rest ran just fine. The JSF application utilizing JPA was successfully deployed to TomCat 5.5.16 on CentOS 4.2 box hosting Oracle XE database. The manual mentioned above shows the basic steps of developing, packaging, and deploying a Web application using the EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API (JPA). In this application, a Java Server Faces (JSF) presentation layer will make use of JPA for persistence outside of the EJB 3.0 container. Screenshots may be viewed at :- http://bderzhavets.blogspot.com/2006/05/build-web-application-jsf-using-jpa.html