I think that the components.xml files can be very large with all the components definitions, then I thought separating by ClassName.component.xml. The ClassName.component.xml is only loaded when exists a ClassName class in the package, but the class will be in jar and the archives open will not be loaded.

It would be great if the components loader loaded all the *.components.xml files of the directories that you cited in your reply. Is this is possible?

Thank you Gavin,

I'm trying to do this with a little modification in Initialization.scanForHotDeployableComponents, adding this code, that load all .component.xml in META-INF from the redeploy classloader:

try {
 URL[] urls = Classpath.search(redeployStrategy.getClassLoader(),
 "META-INF/", ".component.xml");
 for (URL url : urls) {
 try {
 log.info("reading " + url);
 installComponentsFromXmlElements(XML.getRootElement(url
 .openStream()), getReplacements());
 } catch (Exception e) {
 throw new RuntimeException("error while reading " + url, e);
 }
 }
} catch (IOException e1) {
}