After further investigation, I realised that this file exists because of a limitation of Openshift. The wsatsimple application is deployed to the server as ROOT.war and hence the WebService gets registered under http://***.rhcloud.com/ROOT/...

I could use @WebContext annotation in the code, but that won't work locally. That's why jboss-web.xml was used on openshift deploys.

On top of that, I tried JBDS and it ignores jboss-web.xml as its marked on default profile. jbds++