That might work for new things, but the JBoss engineers are constantly replacing existing components with new components, and when they do old stuff stops working. Example: 6m2 changed the way logging is defined. Thus anyone who set up logging in 6m1 has to redo it based on the changes. A similar thing will happen when they switch from JBoss Messaging to HornetMQ (I think that is planned for M3). Sure, if you use only the Java EE APIs, you are probably in good shape. But for any configuration information, you will scramble to make updates. And web services can use a lot of configuration information. (Though I have to admit that web services configuration was fairly constant through the various AS 5 betas...)