1) I'm probably not asking that question correctly...lemme try again. How does Seam know that there's a new conversation, such that it has to increment or change the conversation ID to a new number? What confuses me is that at any time there's a cid request parameter value...what indicates to Seam that it's time to start a new conversation (apart from hitting another @Begin method)? I keep hearing that Seam solves the "back button issue", whatever that is...does Seam do this through conversations? 2) Regarding the persist(), it actually is for a brand new entity, which is why I seemed so amazed. Does this happen because of the fact that the entity has been "created" through its use as a backing bean (but I don't see how it became managed by the persistence context). By the way, can I output everything that's being managed in a given persistence context? (I don't mean EntityManager's contains()) 3) Is there any simple way to get writes going to one DB and reads going to its replicated DB (or balance between that and the original DB in addition)? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3995040#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...