I find things defined in XML files to be very hard to maintain and try to stay away from them and use annotations instead. Also putting variables not tied to beans into the request scope also makes it hard to maintain -- as it is hard to determine what bean put them there. I like to "bean qualify" all my EL expressions so it is simple to find the bean and the property that is being used. Also in a large application, it would be a bit of a challenge to ensure unique EL names if many bean properties suddenly became available in the root EL context. For small applications like those examples seam provides, it is fine, but when you may have hundreds of backing beans and views, it gets a lot harder. So the reason is so that I can keep the properties of a bean inside that bean and manage the life-cycle of those properties from within that bean (basically encapsulation). View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4021365#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...