quoted from the OWB dev list:<br><br>From my point of view this is a conceptual mismatch: One spec uses the
annotation just for binding specific beans to a literal name, the other
one uses it for differentiate between multiple beans. <br>Even this should
be no immediate issue for JSR 299&#39;s typesafe resolution mechanism, if a
single bean is further qualified with specific @Named name, I do not
feel well, if people are going to use this annotation as a qualifying
one like @Named(&quot;stage_test&quot;) on multiple beans. The EL namespace gets
polluted with unresolvable names and developers become potentially
confused by the ambiguous usage of the annotation. <br><br>In brief: Identifiers (like EL names or Spring bean IDs) does not feel like being qualifiers (e.g. @Asynchronous) from my point of view.<br><br>br, Sven<br><br><br>
<br><br>&gt; Reusing it for defining the EL name does make sense semantically to<br>

&gt; me. In general qualifiers are used in resolution, in the &quot;by name&quot;<br>&gt; 
case, we have a special qualifier.