https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBAS-5900 This raises the issue of a change in behaviour in "Russian doll" packaging in JBoss5. The behaviour asserted is actually not tested in the AS testsuite, instead it is documentated to be otherwise, see "Deploy Applications Inside of An Application" here: http://docs.jboss.org/jbossas/upgrade4/html/ "If you want to make a subdeployment (for those archives that support simple Russian Doll packaging), place it in the root of the parent deployment." (My emphasis) Possible Solutions: 1) We could create a new but deprecated "DirectoryStructure" that adds this behaviour for backwards compatiblity purposes. i.e. instead of ignoring directories inside deployments that don't have a META-INF subfolder, we could scan them (recursively) for deployments. 2) We could add something to that treats directories like "lib" specially and scans them for jars, since this is becoming a standard within JavaEE. 3) Close the issue saying it was an "undocumented feature" View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4173370#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...