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I fail to un drstand why do I ned to add this files to the deployment archive that would mean I would have to place a copy in all the archives.Is there a single location from where it can pick
Yes, thats a major concept behind J2EE: isolatable classloaders. If you don't care about isolating the classloaders, then you can just drop the needed jars into you jboss server/lib directory and all deployments on that server will be able to see them.
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Further I would like to ask, would adding a Hibernate service using a Mbean to the server----.xml file and then using JNDI to read the mapping files adviseable in a production environment.
Absolutely. Have a look at the JBoss-Hibernate integration.
http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=JBossHibernate