We have now switched to a bootstrap API rather than using the ServletContext to bootstrap - this allows the AS to have a much better control of boot, and also removes the need to specify SPI implementation via properties files, META-INF/services or other means. You can read the updated guide at http://docs.jboss.org/webbeans/reference/snapshot/en-US/html/ri-spi.html -- Pete Muir http://www.seamframework.org http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Pete