jaikiran pai [http://community.jboss.org/people/jaikiran] created the discussion "What makes a business method asynchronous?" To view the discussion, visit: http://community.jboss.org/message/552992#552992 -------------------------------------------------------------- ... other than the use of @Asynchronous annotation or it's xml equivalent. >From what I see in the EJB3.1 Spec, Section 4.5.1: The @Asynchronous annotation is used to designate which business methods are asynchronous. ... Asynchronous methods can also be designated via the deployment descriptor. I do however see that in our async interceptor (which has to decide whether to spawn a new thread or continue in the current one), we additionally check for method return type to decide whether it's asynchronous: // Determine if asynchronous (either returns Future or has @Asynchronous)       if (invocation.resolveAnnotation(Asynchronous.class) != null || actualMethod.getReturnType().equals(Future.class)) Just wondering whether this is OK. The only side-effect that I can think of, with this implicit rule for asynchronous method, is the difference in transaction semantics for that method invocation. -------------------------------------------------------------- Reply to this message by going to Community [http://community.jboss.org/message/552992#552992] Start a new discussion in EJB 3.0 Development at Community [http://community.jboss.org/choose-container!input.jspa?contentType=1&...]