Is deployer order solely based on inputs/outputs now? If so I believe I have a serious problem. I don't think the current approach in the EJB3 container of creating DependencyItems and RegistryPlugins is going to work. The main reason is that the @EJB annotation (and ejb-ref XML metadata) is incomplete. It does not have enough information to correctly define the dependency. This is why there were two deployers: EJBRegistrationDeployer and EJBStage2Deployer. Registration was supposed to work first on all deployments before Stage2. Stage2 would be able to determine the "REAL" dependencies by searching for @EJB refs (and @PersistenceUnit refs for that matter) based on: 1. Look in the jar first for the reference 2. Look in the EAR 3. Look globally EE6 will complicate things further as EJB jars will be deployable within WARs. Do you see the problem I'm getting at? Since @EJB is incomplete, it could be possible for it to resolve to something it is not supposed to. Some links to WIKI or forum posts would be helpful. (and no adrian, google doesn't always work as you have to know what to search for). thanks View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4081875#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...