"aditsu" wrote : Could we perhaps have an adapter (abstract listener class) with annotated callback methods, that we can extend for defining listeners with compile-time checking? And for compile time checking to make any sense, we'd have to change the API from cache.addListener(Object) to cache.addListener(AbstractListener) which means that no one would have the flexibility of only using the annotation-based approach. The other thing we considered was a combination interface/annotation approach, where we'd use an empty CacheListener interface instead of the class-level @CacheListener annotation, followed by method level annotations. We thought that this was a pretty pointless exercise since the interface, being empty, didn't really buy anything and would be almost as pointless as Serializable. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4066098#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...