Its even more simple than that :) The deployer has already created the objects and injected the property values. So you need to 1) Create the ValidatorFactory 2) Get the Validator interface 3) Validate the object passed in as an argument against the Default group (for now) 4) If an empty set is returned - do nothing 5) If the set contains ConstraintViolation's create an exception with the violations embedded The rest is handled by Hibernate Validator - which does its own annotation scanning. And you can assume that the correct classloader is already set. View the original post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4246709#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...