JBoss Setup for Developers

First, read the discussion on Tomcat Setup for Developers. JBoss setup has the same considerations about environment (where the application has dependencies on external directories like /etc or /var but you want to run on Windows).

Production services runs the Red Hat JBoss product release. However, for development you install a JBoss on your machine simply to support *.ear files, or to use EJBs, or because the installer creates a JBoss version of the JNDI environment variables for production. You get the same support for all these features and the JBoss peculiar ClassLoaders if you install the open source version of the server from jboss.com. Install the version that corresponds to the production environment (that is, JBoss 5 or JBoss 6).

Generally an application has to use the JBoss container provided JAR files for any library that JBoss provides. Maven builds will be configured to use the right version of libraries at compile time, but then exclude the library from the WAR or EAR so requests for the classes fall through to JBoss. If you need an exact release of a specific library, it may be necessary to install the exact release of JBoss used in production, but generally you can make do with a version of Hibernate or SLF4J that is pretty close to the target release number.