JBoss provides a default application that serves content for the root application context. This default context is the ROOT.war application in the jbossweb-tomcat55.sar directory. You can serve static files not associated with any other application by adding that content to the ROOT.war directory. For example, if you want to have a shared image directory you could create an image subdirectory in ROOT.war and place the images there. You could then access an image named myimage.jpg at http://localhost:8080/images/myimage.jpg.