It seems that we are missing one use case of annotation processing.

e.g. if you specify a stateful bean in the ejb-jar.xml and have a bean without a top-level annotation like:

public class RemoveBean
{
 @Remove
 public void remove()
 {
 }
}

As it is now the Stateful annotation processor requires a top-level @Stateful annotation to be able to create the metadata.
Therefore the annotation deployer only looks for those top-level annotations - which makes sense, as this annotation is required to create the correct metaData with ejbName and ejbClass.

To work around this problem we would need to skip this top-level processing and create the metaData based on the xml metaData.

So in more detail what needs to be added to the JBoss50Creator is something like:

 public JBoss50MetaData create(Collection<Class<?>> classes)
 {
 // Create meta data
 JBoss50MetaData metaData = create();

 for(EnterpriseBeanMetaData bean : ejbJarMetaData.getEnterpriseBeans())
 {
 Class<?> ejbClass = classLoader.loadClass(bean.getEjbClass());
 if(! classes.contains(ejbClass))
 {
 if(bean.isSession())
 {
 SessionBeanMetaData sb = (SessionBeanMetaData) bean;
 JBossSessionBeanMetaData sessionBean = new JBossSessionBeanMetaData();
 sessionBean.setEjbName(sb.getEjbName());
 sessionBean.setEjbClass(sb.getEjbClass());
 if(sb.isStateful())
 {
 StatefulProcessor processor = new StatefulProcessor(finder);
 sessionBean.setSessionType(SessionType.Stateful);
 processor.process(sessionBean, ejbClass);
 metaData.getEnterpriseBeans().add(sessionBean);
 }
 else
 {
 sessionBean.setSessionType(SessionType.Stateless);
 // ...
 }
 }
 else if(bean.isMessageDriven())
 {
 // ...
 }
 }
 }

 processMetaData(classes, metaData);
 return metaData;
 }

This (not compiled prototype) basically processes every class defined in the xml if not already picked up by the annotationDeployer.
I think this should be handled differently in future, but i would consider that as last minute workaround :)