How to allow applications to load external files via the classpath on JBoss

Issue

• We have few applications in EARs and our problem is that we build a different EARs for each environment (containing environment specific property files). We would like to change the EARs to be environment neutral and have the environment specific property files deployed outside the EARs. How do we configure application specific (isolated) external classloaders in JBoss? Is there a better way of doing this without major changes to applications?