Hi George,
I totally understand what you mean, I'm a jBPM core and console developer using netbeans :) .
The thing is, that all the web tooling provided by the project is using GWT, so for most of the projects we (and the technology of course) allows us to start the apps in Dev Mode (also know as hosted mode) or if you want to run the app for your end users you have a set of project called -distribution wars, which are wars specifically created for different application servers/servlet containers. If you want to run the Uberfire Showcase Webapp from netbeans, you can but in hosted mode (that means that it will be using a jetty instance started by the maven gwt plugin). For doing that you need to run the: mvn gwt:run goal, which you can easily do from inside netbeans. If you want to deploy the app to jboss please look at the distribution wars.
The same for all the other tools like the jbpm console ng showcase, the drools workbench, etc.
Cheers