I have a start up class configured which refers to many other class files present in the ear file. The ear is a exploded directory placed outside the jboss installation directory.
The startup jar file is specified in the jboss-service.xml file as follows
<classpath codebase="file:D:/app/app.ear/app.war/WEB-INF/lib" archives="appStartUp.jar"/>
Set the classpath in run.bat for the class files so that the ear and startup file both could refer to the same files.