It needs to be part of the container metadata as in general this should be coming from some server/clustered configuration potentially set by the admin tools. A tomcat deployer specific setting is just an override to a higher level server setting. In general we need to forget that xml exists, and define a metadata model that encapsulates all externalized behavior, and then map the sources of that information onto the metadata model. The tomcat deployer is a long way from correctly using such a model due to its internal parsing of its own descriptors like server.xml, conf/web.xml, etc. Its a todo to have jbossweb completely driven by the web container metadata model. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4098959#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...