Reposting because my xml tags were swallowed, can't find a way to post with </> using [] instead, sorry...

My software company is considering migrating from Tomcat 4 to JBoss 4, but I am stuck with a the following problem:

For organization reasons, our webapps are located in a directory structure rooted at a SOFT_HOME directory. During the development process there can be many different SOFT_HOME directories (different versions, customers, ...) which leads to about 20 webapps which need to be deployed/undeployed when needed.
The problem is I can't find a way to easily deploy/undeploy a webapp (exploded or not) located outside the [conf]/deploy/ jboss directory.

With Tomcat this can easily be done by dropping/removing the appropriate xml file in the Tomcat webapps/ directory (the xml file contains a [Context] element which locates the war elsewhere on the filesystem).


I can't find a way to use a similar feature in JBoss.

The only solution I found is :
* edit the conf/jboss-service.xml and add several URL file://[path_to_webapps] to the URLs attribute of the URLDeploymentScanner element.
* rename all my webapps directory to .war

Renaming to .war is ok (still compliant with Tomcat), but editing a comma separated list of URLs is cumbersome: you cannot use this mechanism to easily hot deploy/redeploy a webapp from one location (as in deploy/).

Another solution would be to edit the embedded Tomcat context.xml file and add [Context] elements, but this is still not satisfying as all webapp configurations would be located in a big monolithic file (and no hot deploy/undeploy).

So my question is: does anyone know a way of putting an xml file in the deploy/ directory which will trigger the deployment of a webapp (exploded or not) located at any given location in the file system outside the jboss deploy/ directory? (Removing the file would undeploy the war)

I guess this file would be a jboss service but I don't know what to put in it...