Scott Marlow I have to be honest that I really dislike this proposal to use javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension from Hibernate. I do wonder if there is some way that the WF "application deployment level" BeanManager could instead "queue up" the calls Hibernate makes (or any JPA provider really) to its BeanManager and pass them to the "real BeanManager" when it is ready?

Outside of WF managing this, I think at best (until/if CDI offers a better solution as I outlined) we could maybe delay CDI registration until first use. Possibly. I'd still have to take a look and see if that is feasible. We know for certain that at the least that means that CDI registration errors would no longer be known at deployment time, which is the proper time they should be reported. We'd have to see what other concerns come from that work.