I would like to improve the management of these components, and I'm investigating doing it by packaging each as an EAR or WAR.  I've been trying to find some documentation on asynchronous startup and dependencies between services and webapps in JBoss, without luck.

 

Does anyone have a recommendation for an approach, or could point me at some documentation?

We're a bit thin on documentation, so you'll have to do some digging.

But it shouldn't be that difficult. ;-)

We already support asynchronous deployment -- see ControllerMode.ASYNCH.

There is also already a simple way to declare top level deployment and service dependency:

* see jboss-dependency.xml at http://community.jboss.org/wiki/JBoss5custommetadatafiles

But since you have services running in diff VMs, you could implement your own DependencyItem,

which would use remote call to check if dependecies are satisfied.

ps: there is remote support on our roadmap, but it's far away atm,

so, if you produce some interesting/nice solution, we could make it part of Kernel ;-)