There's a narrow line between ease of use and modularity. If you do one of them more than needed the other one gets defeated. So regarding @tags, you should be careful about the ammount of @tags you put in the code. I can categorize the @tags into two groups: development-oriented and deployment-oriented. Something like a @transaction or a ejbql or a @ejb.finder is really development oriented. Your code expects it to be defined in a specific way, it's bound to your code, your code needs it that way. On the other hand something like a jndi physical mapping is not something your code utterly needs to know exactly, it's deployment-oriented. XDoclet has @tags for both. If you choose to use deployment-oriented tags because of the ease of use then I encourage you to either use merge points or ant properties to externalize those stuff from the code while still using @tags.

Ara.