It's not MVC pattern, but FACADE pattern. You don't need an EM on client, because EM can't do anything for you on client for client-server applications. EM performs transactionally CRUD operations on server. You have two options: 1) passing detached object to client, let client work on them, and eventually reattach them to EM on server -> less code 2) converting entities (model) to dto object and viceversa -> more flexibility At the moment I've chosed the second option because I can't download to client all the Hibernate classes required to manage detached entity. In the second case try out Dozer, it's a mapping library that does all the bidirectional mapping between model and dto quite automagically. If your application is a standalone application, without server connection, so you have the database directly on client, you must bootstrap an embedded container and follow the general ejb3 tutorial. There's a lot of sample that explain how to do that. ciao F View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3958321#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...