Thanks for the quick response, Guillaume.

I just created a DtoTraversableResolver, which was easy enough

It's a bit of a shame that the Bean Validation spec defines the use of JPATraversableResolver in such a way, without any other utility to request whether the entity to be validated is a domain one or a JPA one. Indeed, it's quite ironic that, as just found out while debugging, Eclipselink ignores that resolver and uses its own one (AutomaticLifecycleValidationTraversableResolver); so in the end JPATraversableResolver is only used with the entities that are not JPA-related... o_o

Anyway, as you pointed out, the performance penalty is in the Weblogic code, not Hibernate Validator, so I will open a ticket there too. And I guess we can close this one (and maybe take the insight above as a suggestion for further revisions of the BV spec).

Thanks!