I'd thought about this separation of the deployment chain and the runtime a while back. AFAICT it seemed quite simple; looked like the different functionality in TomcatDeployer was largely separated into different methods, with the stuff related to controlling the webserver lifecycle encapsulated into create/start/stop/destroy and the deployment stuff quite separate. The only common bit I saw was the fact that both sides were interested in conf/web.xml. As long as that resource was in a location visible to both deploy and deployers, it might just be a matter of splitting the class. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4124093#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...