ok... on the coding front... was able to manage having the backend buildable via the CLI (command line interpreter or a shell etc)... was able to do cheesy unit testing because everything is now accessible even without an EJB CMP/CMR container... sweet :)... spring also literally separates the layers so all in all everything is much more flexible now... the next task is to remove resin dependencies so that i can make this thing work on suns free application server...