Actually, since at this moment the handler classes are instantiated at each use and thrown away afterwards, the use of them is stateless by definition. So if users use instance variables (fields) to hold variables temporarily they can somehow always be refactored as local variables in the execute method (or maybe as method calls in some superclass as in Robert's case). In these cases the change will indeed not be backwards compatible. The question is whether the performance gain of being able to cache these action handlers is worth the incompatibility. In my opinion it is. Of course, action handlers need to clearly be documented as stateless if we perform this change. Cheers, Koen View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4211516#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...