Since JBoss AS 5 is built on top of Microcontainer, it's effectively a network of beans just doing their respective jobs. You have already probably noticed that it ships with 3 included configurations: minimal, default, and all.

Unfortunately, they're awefully far apart along the spectrum of configuration options. The minimal configuration barely gets the container running, while the all configuration includes, well, everything. For most apps, it's safe to start with the default configuration. But default to who? It's the 80% case. But the 80% of the world who gets by with default, it still probably includes way more than they need. Of course, each user needs a different subset of that 80%.

Given that the MC is managing a graph, it seems like we should be able to actually perform a solve to determine what is or is not required. Or at least get a good idea. Bonus points if someone can then twiddle conf/, deploy/ and deployers/ to tidy things up.

Anyhow, for the jboss-as-rails project, I'm kicking it old-school, and going with default. I'm jamming it into git, and hopefully with some help, we can get it pared down to what we need.

The jboss-as-rails project is simply a configuration of AS that includes only what we need, along with the jboss-rails.deployer from the jboss-rails project (notice the subtle naming difference...).

Here's a picture to see how it'll all ultimately fit together.

The plugin will offer rake tasks for managing the included AS, deploying your app. I'll also produce an AS-free version of the plugin, assuming you want to manage your own AS separately.

And poke around jboss-as-rails, see what we can rip out.