Regarding use of aspects for handling failover/loadbalancing, have a look at the following classes in the AS aspects module, o.j.aspects.remoting package: 1) ClientChooserInterceptor -- client side aspect. 2) ReplicantsManagerInterceptor -- server side aspect that propagates cluster topology changes back to the client as response metadata. 3) ClusteredRemoting. This is a class that creates proxies that uses these interceptors. EJB3 uses the first two. It doesn't actually use ClusteredRemoting; rather it does similar things in its own more specialized proxy factories. These classes import the main loadbalancing stuff from the AS cluster module. I've gotten a version of that load balancing stuff extracted out into a separate project that can be checked in. For background on that see http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=89015 View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3976874#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...