I have successfully employed the hibernate as SAR with JBoss, it loads, it deploys, all that good stuff. Everything is packaged in com.hagelnx.hibernate

The problem I'm having is accessing those packages from other parts of my project. For example, in a web project I want to:

import com.hagelnx.hibernate.*

but this will not compile. the SAR is on the classpath, but java says that the package does not exist.

I tried creating a third jar project that declares all the interfaces and including those in both the web and the hibernate project ... but this is leading to great complexity, particularly when trying to write DAOs

So that's the question: How can I access/import the package(s) in the SAR during my builds of other artifacts?

The SAR package is used, for example, by JBoss for deployment purposes. JBoss will place the code in the applications classpath.

For development why not have the build directory in the class path. If you use an IDE (say eclipse for example) then have two projects. One the domain model and the EJB/DAO tier. If both projects are in the workspace then the classpaths will be setup for you.