I'm evaluating migration from Weblogic to JBoss.  The application (ppackaged in an ear file with 7 war files), depends on a startup class to initialize the spring container and populate our cache.

When I look for ways to create a startup class, the documentation is a bit on the lean side.  From the forums, I gather I need to make a sar file (which is hard to find docs on) and in the sar i need a class extends the  interfaces  ServiceBean.  Well, that class dones not seem to exist in the new version of JBOSS, hence, I can not load my app (my spring context is not initialized, and my cache is not initialized).  Without spring and cache, I can not proceed.   

Question:

1 - Is ther any other way to create a LifeCycle type class that listens for the startup/shutdown

2 - is there some simple docs on creating a SAR  (I think this must be a JBoss thing, it does not exist in WebLogic)

Thanks