"wolfc" wrote : The only reason is the profile service. It can't handle annotations, so it needs meta data. | This does not make sense. The profile service handles whatever a deployment can have as an attachment. @ReturnNonNull does not sound any different from @TransactionAttribute as a piece of method metadata. There is nothing that precludes a deployment metadata from using annotations if that is the proper metadata view. The point of the metadata project is that one has to be able to define a metadata complete view such that a management tool can have a model to modify without having to write back to deployment descriptors. You'll have to explain why @ReturnNonNull cannot fit into a components metadata model of its methods. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4113847#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...