Dode, As jason states, this is the same approach we took. But we didn't deploy in as a jar file in deploy dir, but as a war, because our core had some jboss-services, cache definitions, and more. To make it start before other ear files that depend on it, we used this in server/x/conf/jboss-service.xml: | <attribute name="URLComparator">org.jboss.deployment.scanner.PrefixDeploymentSorter</attribute> | And prefixed our applications with numbers, like this: 1core.ear 20app1.ear 30app2.ear View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4093895#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...