Hi,
I've got a question regarding the deployment in JBoss (JBoss 4.0.0)
Is there a possiblity to deploy an application (war or ear) by just
putting a kind of proprietary deployment descriptor file inside JBoss's deploy directory.
The deployment descriptor just contains among others information where
the directory structure for the application starts.

Tomcat offers such a deployment mechanism.
The Tomcat documentation states (see http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.1-doc/config/host.html#Automatic%20Application%20Deployment:

Any XML file in the directory defined by appBase (Application Base directory) is assumed to contain a Context element (and its associated subelements) for a single web application. The docBase attribute of this <Context> element will typically be the absolute pathname to a web application directory, or the absolute pathname of a web application archive (WAR) file (which will not be expanded).

During the start-up of Tomcat the web application referenced by means
of the docBase attribute of the XML file will be deployed automatically.

I think this mechanism is quite nice, because
you do not need to make nasty copies of a lot of files. For deployment
only one file must be copied into the deploy directory.

Especially during development this kind of mechanism was quite nice.
The developer could develop his project inside a development environment workspace (which is independent from the jboss installation). After deploying the web application once
(by means of copying the proprietary deployment descriptor file in the deployment directory), the Tomcat
Classloader automatically reloads modified classes.
The developer does not have to initiate a redeploy, which copies all
modified classes inside the deployment directory.

Regards Karin