I think the name attribute started with me looking at this and playing in the IDE some. I think it is important to have the ability to rename the way a method/action is invoked outside of renaming the method. Since we are helping POJOs get onramped to the bus, it is important for compatibility with other external libraries that I might to call it something other then the name of the method. I would further argue that if it is in the xml it should be in an annotation, and if it is in the annotation it should be in the xml. I would think the Seam/Hibernate guys might have some thoughts on this that you can apply.