You can do all the Seam configuration in XML, but I don't know of any way to express the hibernate validation annotations outside of the class. (I don't know that it isn't possible either) Just a side note - the annotations do not need to be present at runtime to use your class. If you declare @Length and it isn't available at runtime, your class will simply not have that metadata. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4011440#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...