HHH-5562 is done, which introduces a locator/discovery means for integrating with Hibernate. Specifically it introduces the (alternate name suggestions welcome, i am indifferent to this one) org.hibernate.impl.Integrator interface. It does discovery based on a classpath lookup for a well-defined filename (can discover multiple) which names an implementor of this interface. The process occurs in the midst of Sessionfactory building to account for the main use cases I know of including Envers, Search, Validation and BV. Currently I additionally define those 4 as "built in" integrators, meaning there is no need for them to define auto-discovery files unless we want them to be integrated in that manner (I know for example that Search is interested in this via HSEARCH-595). Anyway, we should probably decide pretty early which integrations we want done which way. Actually I take one part back. Envers is actually handed by discovery due to the fact that it is in a separate project (jar). The others were done this way because they already had the reflection code in place to do this. So for it, we need to decide if we want to go the opposite way. --- Steve Ebersole <steve(a)hibernate.org&gt; http://hibernate.org