Hi Pedro,
What is most tricky is that JBossWS-Native went from using Tomcat as Endpoint.publish default target container (with or without hacking) to NOT supporting it at all, at least programatically.
That is a pain because, if not for better reason, broke the support for programmatic publishing on JBoss-AS
I see what you mean. That's quite a different thing, despite being related.
Regardless of the JAXWS spec (which kind of suggested a way for doing that, unfortunately we ended up *partially* supporting something similar just for the sake of passing a test on usecase/scenario that appeared kind of broken in the early versions of the spec), this is a feature that might have a value in general (programmatically publishing a ws endpoint on JBoss AS).
Unfortunately that's not supported as of today (and as Richard tried explaining, the previous hack won't have worked today).
To be honest this functionality is implemented in a few other JBoss projects; I think I remember the SwitchYard (ESB) and Riftsaw do something similar, probably getting a handle to the deployers, I might need to check / look / ask for the details.
Some months back I've been reasoning on this feature wrt the AS7 integration development (http://community.jboss.org/message/572530#572530), however we've been caught by a lot of other AS7 integration issues and the ability to have a MSC service for starting an endpoint independently from a server deployment is still not there and not being worked. Btw, the main blocking dependency for doing that would still not be satisfied (basically, JBossWeb support for programmatically starting a web app in general, https://issues.jboss.org/browse/AS7-351). From a AS7 point of view, my feeling is that this feature might be worked only after the JavaEE certification related work is done.