Tthe Cargo Maven2 plugin fails to start Resin. If you check the logs you'll see a: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/codehaus/cargo/container/spi/util/DefaultServerRun This happens if you're using individual Cargo jars. However there's also a bug if you use the core uberjar with Resin (see CARGO-265). The problem with the individual jars is that the ResinRun class used to start Resin is calling the DefaultServerRun class which is located in another jar (in the core util jar) and the way it is currently implemented the core util jar is not passed to the classpath used to start the Resin container.