Hi,
I've been reasoning a bit on what will need to be done to add ws functionalities to AS 7. While the final work will need to wait for the ejb3 subsystem to be available, the current web subsystem should be enough for a limited support (POJO endpoints only), hence for starting looking at the integration.
The domain model additions due to the ws subsystem should be quite trivial; first questions/doubts come when dealing with the deployment instead. As far as I can see, other subsystems define activators that create deployment chains; each of them come with its chain selector and given set of processors that actually deal with the deployment. Selectors seems to trigger the chain processing depending on the kind of the deployment (a war, jar, sar, etc.), or more generally speaking on basic reasoning over the deployment package (name of the virtual file, manifest contents, etc.).
A selector can't be easily defined for detecting "ws deployments" as of course a webservice endpoint could be part of a web deployment or of an ejb deployment.
In AS 5/6 the ws deployers (let's talk about the REAL ones only here) were basically running in between the ejb/web ones, properly modifying (or creating in the case of ejb3 ws deployments) the JBossWebMetaData that was later consumed by the TomcatDeployer.
With the current AS7 architecture, we'd probably need integration hooks for interleaving the ws processors with the web ones. Of course having the web subsystem directly depend on anything in the ws one is not acceptable.
The alternative -defining a new chain for the ws deployment and calling the required web processors in there- is most probably not going to work.
What options do you see here?