Currently we have all the deployment happen within the portal sar and its tied into the internals of the server. With JBoss AS5 we want to remove this functionality from the sar and use the microcontainer deployment framework. This will require the addition of a new jboss-portal.deployer that will need to be placed in the /deployers directory of JBoss AS5 along with the jboss-portal.sar in the /deploy directory. Portlets and our other deployables require a runtime container and these containers have dependencies on other deployables (ie datasources, hibernate, transaction manager). Since these wont be started until after the deployer is running we can't have the containers within the deployer, they must remain in the portal sar. We could place the deployer inside the sar but this would create a race condition of when the deployer is started and when the deployable is deployed. Portal Deployer Will behave like most other deployers and how our current deployment works inside the sar. It will detemine when something of interest is being deployed, parse throught the xml files, gather data about the deployment, manipulate the deployable (adding tlds, the command servlet, ...) and pass the information to the runtime container in the portal sar. It will add a dependency to the deployable to make sure the runtime container is started before deploying it. Runtime Container This is just the various containers we have right now in the sar (instance, portlet, ...). Work is being done here to remove some of the elements to the deployer when required. Still havn't exactly figured out how best to interface the container to the deployer, working right now with mbeans but could also just interface with pojo's running in the microcontainer. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4194401#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...