(note: I talked to dmlloyed on this in #jboss-as7 - he thinks its a bug, hence why I am filing this JIRA)

I have a WAR. I want it to have a service activator in it (I want it to install an MSC service). So, in the WAR's META-INF directory, I create a "services/org.jboss.msc.service.ServiceActivator" file with the appropriate content.

The service fails to activate.

However, if I put that same META-INF content in my WAR's WEB-INF/classes directory (that is, my WAR has a WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/services/org.jboss.msc.service.ServiceActivator), my service activates fine.

I will attach a .war file that you can use to test this. To see what I'm taking about, take the attached war and explode it inside the standalone/deployments directory in AS 7.1.1.Final. Run the app server - you will see in the output this:

INFO [stdout] (MSC service thread 1-5) $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ SERVICE ACTIVATING!

(this output comes from my ServiceActivator's activate() method - it does a System.out.println as soon as activate() is entered).

This shows the WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/services being honored. Now shutdown the app server, cd to the deployments directory and cd down into the exploded war directory. Now move that services/ content directly up to the WAR's own META-INF directory:

mv WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/services META-INF/

Now run the app server again. Notice you do NOT see the "SERVICE ACTIVATING" message.

So it appears the WAR's META-INF/services is ignored when looking for service activators, but when the same services marker file is in WEB-INF/classes/META-INF/services, it works fine.