OK, fine. Now imagine what happens if you upgrade your system, completely changing the order process (potentially multiple times), with orders in the middle of their lifecycle. Some statuses disappear. Some new ones appear. The dependency between statuses changes. The possible transitions change. How can you cope with all that? In practice, its a total disaster unless you are using something like jBPM, in which case you don't need to even think about it. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4058889#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...