If you are dealing with a PAR Archive (very rendundat) you can see the process of deployment in this theorical way: 1) A servlet in the jBPM web console get the PAR octet stream and unzip it in memory. 2) this parse the xml of processdefinition.xml and create and object model in memory (I mean your process definition in the form of Object Instances) 3) this ProcessDefinition object is mapped with hibernate to your Relational Database 4) so with hibernate is persisted in your database tables 5) the classes in your PAR are loaded into the class loader, so now your process instances can access your ActionHandlers, DecisionHandlers, etc. I hope this is clear enough.... View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4189069#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...