I got some feedback that section 10.3.4 from the XML configuration is difficult to read, so I've rewritten it as follows. Should not be a semantic change. 10.3.4. Fields of a Web Bean A field of a Web Bean is declared by a direct child element of the Web Bean declaration. The name of the field is the same as the name of the element. If the Web Bean implementation class has exactly one field with the same name as the child element, then the child element is interpreted to represent that field. Otherwise, if the Web Bean implementation class does not have exactly one field with the specified name, a DefinitionException is thrown by the Web Bean manager at initialization time. If more than one child element of a Web Bean declaration represents the same field of the Web Bean implementation class, a DefinitionException is thrown by the Web Bean manager at initialization time. A field declaration may contain child elements. If a field declaration has more than one direct child element, and at least one of these elements is something other than a <value> element in the Web Beans namespace, a DefinitionException is thrown by the Web Bean manager at initialization time. An element that represents a field may declare an injected field, a producer field or a field with an initial value. • If the element contains a child <Produces> element in the Web Beans namespace, a producer field was declared, as defined in Section 3.5.3, "Declaring a producer field using XML". • If the element contains a child <value> element in the Web Beans namespace, a field with an initial value of type Set or List was declared, as defined in Section 10.3.5, "Field initial value declarations". • Otherwise, if the element has exactly one child element, an injected field was declared, as defined in Section 3.7.2, "Declaring an injected field using XML". • If the element has a non-empty body, and no child elements, a field with an initial value was declared, as defined in Section 10.3.5, "Field initial value declarations". • Otherwise, a DefinitionException is thrown by the Web Bean manager at initialization time. If a field declaration represents an injected field, the child element is interpreted as an injection point declaration, as specified in Section 10.6, "Injection point declarations". If the declared type is not assignable to the Java type of the field, a DefinitionException is thrown by the Web Bean manager at initialization time. The API type declared in XML may be a subtype of the Java field type. In this case, the Web Bean manager will use the API type declared in XML when resolving the dependency. -- Gavin King gavin.king(a)gmail.com http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Gavin http://hibernate.org http://seamframework.org