It seems to be that the IBM VM has inherited an old bug of the Sun's VM. When an annotation is not present in the classpath, it should be ignored and should not raise any sort of exception. This has been clarified by the annotations spec lead a long time ago and quickly fixed by Sun. A workaround would be to put the needed annotation in your classpath (just get the javaee.jar - whatever its name is - from jboss AS for example). View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4083199#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...