I have to design a data model (in a Java EE 6 application) that will be persisted via JPA, and that also needs to be serialized via JAXB. The last time I did that, I had one group of entity classes with JAXB annotations, and another with JPA annotations. This meant that I had to have a lot of boilerplate code for translating between the two. I'm thinking of combining them, so that each class will have both types of annotations. I know this can be done, but my question is, should it be? Will it cause any problems?