Well, if it's the parent class that (exclusively) makes the use of foo, then I guess it makes sense to contain the foo declaration in parent class as much as possible. The only thing that child class does is wiring - specifying what component gets injected into foo. Regardign the second point - yes, it does look complicated in this particular case. Yet, the generic way of overriding annotations in class hierarchy (something that Java currently lacks on the language level, IMHO) might get useful in some situations, even if it's not going to be an often-used feature. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4040732#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...