I can go back to a ResourceHelper approach. This was generally the approach used when JNDI lookup was necessary So, essentially the client code looks the same as it did for EE 1.4, except that the guts of ResourceHelper are different. That's what I mean by annotation at the client side being useless with this restriction.
I was assuming that a custom classloader was detecting the annotations, and that as a result any class loaded by the same classloader as the main class would gain the benefits. If the annotations were detected by the classloader, which has to read the class files anyway, there should be little speed difference unless annotations are actually present.
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