[added seam-dev list to reply] Seam goes out of its way (and when I say Seam, I mean those that design it, you know their names) to ensure that unnecessary JAR files are not required. For an example of a minimal set, check out the tomcat jpa example. ejb-api.jar // definitely not required until you happen to be using one of the EJB annotations persistence-api.jar // It's pretty well accepted at this point that even if you are using native Hibernate, this is a desirable API to have (feel free to question me here) hibernate-validator + hibernate.jar // I will agree that right now it is a bit odd to require hibernate.jar just to use Hibernate Validator. Unfortunately, Hibernate Validator uses a few core imports from Hibernate. Once Bean Validation is out the door, you will be able to use its validators which will be agnostic of Hibernate. It seems like this is your main bone (i.e. compliant). As for seam-gen being a library glutten, that's an area we hope to make advances in the near future. I encourage you to use the Maven 2 POMs if you would like to get a more lean set. I do applaud you challenging us to always keep the required library count down. This is a topic I have pushed for myself over the years. On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 5:02 PM, Sebastian Hennebrueder <usenet(a)laliluna.de&gt; wrote: -- Dan Allen Software consultant | Author of Seam in Action http://mojavelinux.com http://mojavelinux.com/seaminaction NOTE: While I make a strong effort to keep up with my email on a daily basis, life and work come first and, at times, keep me away from my mail for a while. If you contact me, then don't hear back for more than a week, it is very likely that I am excessively backlogged or the message was caught in the spam filters. Please don't hesitate to resend a message if you feel that it did not reach my attention.