A lot of people are, understandably, complaining about the lack of any JBoss Embedded progress. I think the problem isn't so much as a lack of progress. Right now we have (and are still building) a box full of building blocks and we have one assembly putting it all together called the Application Server. I think what we lack (including myself) is a good understanding of what these blocks and the assembly represent.

So what if I take away a couple of these blocks and put them together in another setting? I would get EJB 3.1 Embedded: http://www.jboss.org/wiki/EJB31Embeddable. Basically I start up MicroContainer, boot the Virtual Deployer Framework and only install those deployers relevant to my needs.

So in effect JBoss Embedded isn't that much different than JBoss AS. It's in the configuration that changes might be needed.

Still this does requires some simplified bootstrap and maybe some glue code (see the new ejb3 embedded code). And it all requires some more documentation than a couple of wiki pages.

So for us JBoss AS and JBoss Embedded represent the same thing, just in a different wrapper. Both are MC with VDF, deployers and glue code.