Processes are generally defined at a business scope, not at application run time. A process definition should be built and deployed in it's proper context--that is "Process Definition Lifecycle". Process Definition Lifecycle (and Process Instance Lifecycle for that matter) will rarely coincide with Application Lifecycle, so Application Lifecycle is generally a bad fit for managing either Process Definition Lifecycle or Process Instance Lifecycle. To put it bluntly, unless your Process Definitions are dynamically generated each time your application starts, the act of starting your application shouldn't be deploying your Definitions. All that being said, jBPM DOES need to support a user assigned Version/Release number that can be used by the application to make determinations as to UI requirements/various compatibilities/etc. I've recently been forced to bastardize the processDefinition description field to support this:<description>uiVersion=1, release=1|Service Request for leased circuit</description> ...sorry for this last rabbit trail, but Ronald brought it up, and I do hate parsing strings. :-) View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4123311#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...