Again, we need to start a wiki page for this :-)
  

One thing that should help is that we know integrate with m2eclipse allowing you to at least use maven.

I still don't know (haven't had time to look into it) how we are going to handle (in any IDE) that there are
multiple deployment/configuration descriptors in one project - most non-jbosstools-tools assumes
a specific structure (i.e. persistence.xml is in META-INF and not called something else) - but maybe
maven's profile feature can be used for it....something to explore at least.

I think Maven 2 profiles are the answer, or at least to cover 90%. A tool should be able to do property replacement between Maven 2 properties and the replacement tokens in the files. I'm not sure if this is m2eclipse's responsibility or JBoss Tools (users really don't need to know the details here). This works because Maven 2 behavior is predictable and well defined. With Ant, it's just wild west which files get filtered and where the tokens come from. And the Seam 2 examples use Ant in the most gnarly way.

As for the last 10% (or however many edge cases there are), we can address those on a case-by-case basis in a way that impacts the tooling the least. In the worst case scenario, you have to comment out some code in the source files to support one app server or the other. But I think this is acceptable in small amounts given that once you decide to target an app server, you keep using the same one while developing (so it's not something you have to do over and over).

Let's just push profiles as far as they are willing to go. We'll be Maven ninjas by the time the examples are all setup, no doubt.

Maven profiles doesn't solve this afaik. It only generates the "right" layout in the deployment location which is an area an IDE ignores.

If Maven has support for maintaining an "intermedate" location that the IDE think is the actual source/resource being deployed will work.

Again - I need to play more with this, but a few months ago it was still a problem (i.e. the IDE just become a fancy notepad :)