The AS is going to support two different running modes (see "Standalone Server" vs the rest of the discussion on http://community.jboss.org/docs/DOC-15215) and a flexible configuration for defining the "profile" a server will run. Profiles will not be represented via filesystem directories; rather they will be pure configuration.

The two different running modes will result in slightly different filesystem layouts – see discussion in http://community.jboss.org/thread/153858.

The upshot of all this is using AS 7 will not be like previous versions where you could download the distribution, unzip, cd to bin/ and type ./run.sh -c some-std-config". Rather, I envision something like this:

1) download, unzip, cd bin
2) ./install.sh --someparamstotellitwhatyouwant

Params to tell it what you want would be whether you're running in standalone mode or full domain, which of a set of pre-packaged profiles you want, maybe some more stuff. From this, installer would create the appropriate filesystem layout, generate a domain.xml+host.mxl or standalone.xml

3) ./run.sh