As somebody who is also working with Seam without having previously used JSF/EJB3, I have another observation: I am only very slowly perceiving the boundaries of what's done by Seam vs. Facelets vs. JSF vs. Persistence API vs. EJB3, as well as conversations and a slightly different EL. Sometimes it takes a bit of sleuthing to figure out which piece(s) (if any) provides desired functionality. It's even a bit more difficult since so many things seem to happen by "magic" because 1. there is so much going on behind the scenes, 2. it's taking a little while to get used to the annotations, and 3. sometimes there are conflicting bits of documentation (e.g. meaning of "$" and "#" in EL). I am a fan of declarative programming and DRY though and do think that it's very cool that a lot of functionality is getting implemented with relatively little code to maintain. I can see that some of the problem comes from the fact that Seam can work with many different stacks of packages and that that is in fact a _good_ thing. I've picked JSF, facelets, and EJB3 for my new project based largely on the recommendations I've seen from Gavin. Before I started any coding, I did go through pretty much the complete O'Reilly EBJ3 book by Bill Burke (ISBN 0-596-00978-X, and no, I don't have a financial interest in it) and that has helped a great deal. I keep the Seam reference up in Acrobat constantly. I am also googling a lot. I do know that these manuals are a pain in the *** to write and am very grateful that a lot of serious work has obviously gone into it. I suppose that the answer that I just need to become more familiar with all the various technologies may well be legitimate. I'm sorry that I don't have a constructive alternative but perhaps people who are more immersed in these technologies might see a way to make it clearer to newbies. I expect that the real answer is that when various JSRs are finally adopted, there will be an accepted standard Java EE way of doing this and that this is just the price of using stuff on the bleeding edge. Sigh. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3960841#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...