Really, I view the JARDeployer as a mistake. Its just a mechanism to include content into a classpath dynamically. The problem with this is, its very difficult to control how/in what order that content is included.

In terms of the existing problems you cite, yes, I think we need to add an explicit jar suffix notion of deployments it accepts. I would really like to get rid of the hacky META-INF/*.xml searching currently used to try to determine if a jar is a j2ee jar as well. Without resorting to non-standard jar suffixes (like .classes), I don't see how we can do this though.

Don't we already have the ability to restrict to .jar/.zip based on the last subdeployer suffix handling changes?