The hsqldb-ds.xml has sections which need to be uncommented (and some commented) to enable server mode HSQL DB server. Additionally, a section in the bindings-jboss-beans.xml in JBOSS_HOME/server/<servername>/conf/bindingservice.beans needs to be uncommented too.

The part which fails is:

<connection-url>
<value-factory bean="ServiceBindingManager" method="getStringBinding">
<parameter>jboss:service=Hypersonic</parameter>
<parameter>jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://${hostforurl}:${port}</parameter>
</value-factory>
</connection-url>

The exception is:

Caused by: org.jboss.resource.JBossResourceException: connectionURL is null
at org.jboss.resource.adapter.jdbc.local.LocalManagedConnectionFactory.createConnectionFactory(LocalManagedConnectionFactory.java:90) [:6.0.0.Final]
at org.jboss.resource.connectionmanager.ConnectionFactoryBindingService.createConnectionFactory(ConnectionFactoryBindingService.java:141) [:6.0.0.Final]
... 79 more

The root cause is that the code ends up calling the wrong method on ServiceBindingManger. Instead of calling the getStringBinding with 2 parameters, it ends up calling the getStringBinding with just the single (service name) parameter.

The code which parses the parameters, is in org.jboss.system.metadata.ServiceMetaDataParser:

private ServiceValueMetaData parseValueFactory(Element el) throws Exception
{
...
List<ServiceValueFactoryParameterMetaData> parameters = new ArrayList<ServiceValueFactoryParameterMetaData>();
attr = el.getAttributeNode("parameter");
if (attr != null)

{ parameters.add(new ServiceValueFactoryParameterMetaData(attr.getValue())); }

else
{
NodeList children = el.getChildNodes();
for (int j = 0; j < children.getLength(); j++)
{
// skip over non-element nodes
if (children.item(j).getNodeType() != Node.ELEMENT_NODE)
continue;

Element child = (Element) children.item(j);
if ("parameter".equals(child.getTagName()))

{ parameters.add(parseValueFactoryParameter(child)); }

}
}
....

The code never enters the else part for that above xml configuration. I haven't looked into the details of that getAttributeNode API, but it appears like a bug to me in the xerces impl (i might be wrong), since "parameter" isn't really an attribute.

Assigning this to Ales for now, since that class lies within jboss-jmx-mc-int project.