Basically all JPA implementations expect the URL to point to a jar, so anything packed in a jar will work. The trickery is in the fact that they all interpret jar:mywar.war!/WEB-INF/classes/ as a special jar url. Where they start at mywar.war and use the rest as the starting point entry for scanning. This works wars in ears are exploded out first (previous VFS). But now doesn't work anymore. In which case all JPA implementations fallback to doing: new JarInputStream(url.openStream()); So the vfszip url handler must hook up into that ultimate fallback. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4174061#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...