"jason.greene(a)jboss.com" wrote : This class should *definitely* be immutable. I don't think this class was ever meant to me immutable, otherwise there wouldn't be a freeze()/isFrozen() methods. Afaik the idea is to have it mutable/dynamic to a certain point, e.g. different layers add different scopes, once we're past of allowing this additions we freeze it in order to be able to do deterministic lookups. e.g. the parent get/check could easily be done with System::arraycopy View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4248422#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...