"perwik" wrote : I've followed the development of Seam for about a year now, but it's only recently that I've started to build something with it. I see a need for splitting my project into modules (call them portlets if you like). | | The problem with these modules is that, as far as I understand, if I want to deploy a new version of a module to my site (let's say I've added some features to the forum part of the site) I'd have to redeploy the whole .ear and reload everything (this could be 10 different modules with any number of entities and SFSBs etc.) and by doing that the whole site would be down, if only for a minute or two. Is there something I've missed here? From what I've seen, this kind of dynamic loading is something you'd get with JBoss Portal. I can't imagine how the portal makes this problem of managing different modules any better than just dropping new .ears, .wars, .sars, .hars, etc. into JBoss AS directly. In the scenario you describe above, I would think your 'forum part' is in its own .war or .ear, and thus, you can redeploy as often as you like (caveat: JBoss AS tends to run out of memory after a few hot deploys - the bigger the .ears, .wars, .sars, whatever, the faster it runs out of memory). If you have multiple components share a core dependency, and you change the core dependency in some way, you're simply going to have to redeploy, retest all dependent components - no way around that. The portal can also add a different type of development process to your system - let's say you take the default portal .sar and completely customize it for your business / web site - quite common in a 'real' deployment. Then you're total deployment package is the .sar and any other artifacts that make up your portal site - and that means it's going to be more complicated to make fundamental changes to your site anyway using the portal. All in all, a set of Seam .ears / .wars are probably a bit easier to manage over the lifetime of a real system than the combination of a portal .sar and any other .ears / .wars that make up your system. Happy coding! View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3998747#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...