Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.1 Release Notes (Alpha) for Exploded Managed Deployments currently reads

In JBoss EAP 7.1, you can replace static content files in the deployment and the changes are visible without any redeployment.

This is somewhat insufficient summary of the feature. The feature currently adds the ability to create managed exploded deployments managed and manipulate their contents via deployment management operations.

Addendum by brian.stansberry:

What is says about this one has always been true for unmanaged deployments, e.g. unzipped archives in the deployments/ dir. What's new is this is now supported for managed deployments. See "Background" section of https://developer.jboss.org/docs/DOC-55497 for info on what "managed" and "unmanaged" deployments are.

See https://issues.jboss.org/browse/JBEAP-8941?focusedCommentId=13382507&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-13382507