Thanks for replying.
I know it's not jboss specific and just something I don't understand about java EE in general I guess. I appreciate peoples' time for explaining it.
What I am failing to understand is, for example, JBoss AS 7 provides something like hibernate. It's found in /jboss-home/modules/org/hibernate/main/ and includes hibernate-core and JPA specific entitymanager, etc. But while developing in the IDE I still have add the libraries to the lib folder, use an IDE feature which fetches them some other way, or something like maven which puts them ~/.m2. I don't understand why these jars have to be in two places.
thanks again