The Seam events functionality in CVS is pretty useful. I prefer using the annotations over events.xml but I find the annotations less flexible.

I would like to allow one method to observe multiple event types. How about adding an @Observers annotation that works like @Roles? Here is an an example:

@Observers({
 @Observer("somethingChanged"),
 @Observer("somethingElseChanged")
})
public void refresh() {
 ...
}

This would make my code cleaner especially if I'm observing many event types.

Another suggestion is to add a priority hint to the @Observer annotation. This could just be an arbitrary number (like a z-index) that allows Observer instances to be sorted, allowing methods observing the same event type to be fired in a sensible order. Here is an example:

@Observer("somethingChanged", 0)
public void meFirst() {
 ...
}

@Observer("somethingChanged", 100)
public void meNext() {
 ...
}

I hope this makes sense, I'll add this to JIRA if you think so.