The first step doesn't need to be very complicated. We just need to logically seperate the deployment chain from the runtime. Migrating to POJOs isn't a requirement. You can leave all the classes in the jbossweb.deployer deployment for now, there's no need to seperate immediately runtime classes from deployment classes. If you look at jbossweb.deployer/META-INF/war-deployer-beans.xml it contains a number of deployers but these mix the deployment process with the runtime. What we want is a 1) deployers/jbossweb.deployer that is just the deployers and handles the metadata (constructing ServiceMetaData for the individual web apps) 2) deploy/jbossweb this is the runtime that the mbeans above get deployed into In more detail, the current deployers are 1) WebAppParsingDeployer Ok, this parses the web.xml to create a WebMetaData 2) JBossWebAppParsingDeployer Adds the jboss-web.xml to the WebMetaData (again ok, except the loader repository stuff which shouldn't be in the parsing layer) 3) WebAppClusteringDefaultsDeployer This is ok. It just modifies the WebMetaData to add defaults 4) WebAppClusteringDependencyDeployer Again just modifies the metadata to add dependencies that will later be used by the mbean deployment 5) WarDeployer This is what is wrong. It does at least two things 5a) It configures Tomcat 5b) It creates the ServiceMetaData that represent web deployments My guess is that it also handles some of the runtime process of that ServiceMetaData as well? Instead what should happen is that the runtime processing (configuration of the connectors and the other bits associated Tomcat's runtime in the server.xml) should be in deploy/jboss-web as a seperate service. The MBean that gets constructed from the ServiceMetaData will interact with this seperate runtime. In summary, the deployers should just be deailing with the metadata {jboss-}web.xml -> WebMetaData -> ServiceMetaData this ServiceMetaData will then desribe a WebDeployment MBean that will interact with the runtime services to create the actual WAR. Once that is done, we will no longer neded to pull lots of services like the transaction manager or the CachedConnectionManager into the bootstrap just to satisfy the Tomcat deployer's dependency on them. The clustering part of the WAR deployment has it correct, in that the dependencies are just names (not implementation) that will be satiisfied when those services are deployed. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4124067#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...