Thanks for the insight. I'll try out those strategies and report back.
I forgot to mention that I am using the JBoss Developer Studio 5 Beta 3 (i.e., the latest and greatest). I'll stay current with the latest development releases as I explore this scenario.
Btw, Fedora does provide a way to run an instance of JBoss AS 7 as a user. The command jboss-as-cp creates a new installation in your home directory (location of choice) that consists only of the writable files, with links to all the read-only files (call it a skinny instance). That's the second scenario to research. I had trouble with it in the Fedora Beta (could have been user error), so I need to give it a try with the final release.
While I agree that deploying huge archives on each cycle is not good for iterative development, I still think it should be supported. It's just a matter of pushing the archive over the management interface rather than a direct copy.
Incremental updates over the management interface would be killer.
Btw, I'll likely retract my request to have JBoss Tools start the system service. That's probably out of scope for JBoss Tools server runtimes. However, if there is a way in JBoss Tools to use a shell command (I believe there is an integrated shell) that will do the trick.
This issue is partly documentation, partly feature request. We can probably come up with documentation to make it work as is, but if we can close the gap on the requests, that documentation will read better :)
JBoss + Fedora FTW!