Thanks Scott for the answer. This is needed if the ejb3 jacc layer is to be aligned(not immediate). My usecase is given a jar file, I should be able to tell whether it is an ejb deployment (do not care whether it is ejb2 or ejb3 or both). For ejb2, it is simple - existence of metadata files is sufficient. For ejb3, is there something that determines whether a jar file (that does not have any metadata files) may contain ejb3 beans? The two options you listed do not solve this. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3996583#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...