Adding to the classpath for a WAR in JBoss EAP 5.x

Issue

• How do we configure a resources directory so that, for example, property files can be found within a war, but outside the WEB-INF/classes directory?

webapp.war
├── META-INF
│   └── MANIFEST.MF
├── resources
│   └── some.properties
└── WEB-INF
    ├── classes
    │   └── ...
    └── web.xml

• I’m in the process of upgrading our JBoss EAP application server from version 4.0.5 to 5.1 but I’m having issues deploying my existing web applications. I have several war files that have resources stored inside the war file that I access via the class loader like this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResource(...) and every getResource call seems to return null.