The first thing I noticed about pulling Maven and JBoss together was that the EJB packaging didn’t seem quite as intuitive as I thought.  In the end I did end up using the EJB plugin and the dependency plugin to get the dependencies in place.  This meant including both the plugins in an EJB parent POM.

<plugin>
<artifactId>maven-ejb-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<archive>
<manifest>
<addClasspath>true</addClasspath>
</manifest>
</archive>
<ejbVersion>3.0</ejbVersion>
</configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin
</artifactId>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>copy</id>
<phase>compile</phase>
<goals>
<goal>copy-dependencies</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<outputDirectory>target/classes</outputDirectory>
<excludeScope>provided</excludeScope>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

With that code in place you just need to ensure you set the packaging to EJB on your EJB’s. I thought that copying the dependencies into the target was probably the nicest way, also you need to watch your dependencies and ensure that those you don’t want to use have a scope of provided so they they don’t get bundled. At first I thought that the dependency embedding should have been part of the EJB plugin, but actually given the power of the dependency plugin it actually made more sense to use that.