Well I think one option would be to explore using Jandex within commons-annotations. Jandex is meant as a very lightweight (read: FAST) annotation reader. commons-annotations is meant to read annotations and merge the annotated values with xml overrides. But commons-annotations could certainly use Jandex for the "read annotations" portion of its mandate (I think). I think commons-annotations is slow also because of how it reads XML. Reading XML is always going to be a balance between (relative) speed and readability/maintainability. In the new ORM code, we moved to StAX + JAXB. My preliminary testing showed that to be a pretty great compromise on that balance scale. But commons-annotations does not at all work with JAXB nor JAXP. As far as I know it just directly used dom4j apis (granted most likely because that is what ORM used). And for the record, I never said throw commons annotations away. Stopping using it in a particular project moving forward is much different. I just don't think it makes sense to write "throw away code". I'd avoid fixing commons-annotations and retrofitting fixes into the old org.hibernate.mapping package. We know that code is going away. If someone wants to write such throw away code, be my guest :) On Tue 26 Jun 2012 01:39:30 PM CDT, Steve Ebersole wrote: -- steve(a)hibernate.org http://hibernate.org