I'm no expert, but I'll give me two cents. ) Looking through the SOA lens, can the action beans be thought of as services? For example, would it be ok to think of HotelBookingAction as HotelBookingService? Sure. HotelBookingAction is an Seam implementation of HotelBooking, where it outlines the business operations as part of booking a hotel. anonymous wrote : 2) From a layered architecture perspective, do you think of the action beans as presentation-tier or middle-tier? I ask this because action beans seem to have presentation logic, e.g. the actions return navigation outcomes. Where is the boundary between the two layers? At least in the booking example, I don't see the Action classes rely on navigation outcomes. They are part of the middle-tier. Page actions as those defined in pages.xml bridges the presentation and the middile-tier. This is what really nice about Seam. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3997700#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...