the idea is very interesting. some thoughts: in case of remote communication, you get back an updated copy of the original command that you supplied as a parameter. with this you introduce the overhead of introducing a typed member for the result in *all* the commands, while the map containing multiple results was only needed for a few. when returning an object, it is up to the command what is returned. in any case, that has to be properly documented in the javadocs of the command. so the command could decide to use the proposed pattern and return itself as the result. by keeping object, we still can use the suggested approach, but we don't force it on all the commands. despite all these cons-thoughts i still think it is an interesting idea and i don't want to ditch the idea just yet. but overall, i'm not yet convinced. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4036614#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...