Just thinking a little more about the OSGi and JBoss-modules use-cases...

While all of the above seems fine - there is a missing part IMHO. If you're in OSGi or in JBoss modules, it's still kinda hard to find out what the classloader is that you need to pass in. In the simple case its the classloader that loads the sw-impl-base module but how you find that classloader is non-trivial (I think). Therefore I would recommend that in addition to what you did, you register the ArchiveFactory as a service, either in MSC, in OSGi, or in both. This means that someone who wants to use SW from such an environment doesn't need to do any crazy stuff to find the appropriate classloader. The ArchiveFactory instance is just there. It also means that the user doesn't need to declare a hard dependency on the impl-base module.

You can do this in a way that doesn't hamper anyone else...

• For OSGi you simply add a bundle activator that registers the instance
• For JBoss-modules/msc you add a service activator that registers the instance
  Ideally you would do both

The nice thing is that if you're running outside of any of these the activators are ignored...
If you need any help with this I would be happy to assist...

Yup, I actually plan on installing the Domain (which has the ArchiveFactory and the Configuration both) as a service. Don't quite know how to do that yet, but I figure that's just details.

Great - can't wait to see it

Can you point me to an example of a simple OSGi harness I can use for testing to be sure things are working as expected?

How about this one from the jboss-as smoke test suite:
https://github.com/jbossas/jboss-as/blob/master/testsuite/smoke/src/test/java/org/jboss/as/test/embedded/osgi/SimpleArchiveProviderTestCase.java

To run it, just go to jboss-as/testsuite/smoke and run 'mvn test'