hot deployment is an implementation detail, but I'm talking about identifying a directory vs an archive (exploded or not) for other purposes as well. The VFS alone cannot determine this. What I was suggesting was adding an attributes or perhaps simply a properties accessor to the VFS api to allow additional information to be built up from the structure deployer, etc. The complication with this is keeping it around. This should not be too hard for in memory usage that is built up only for the current runtime. Persisting such info across restarts is a little more involved as its a security issue to need write access to the filesystem. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4163118#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...