Hi,
having played around a bit with the JSR 303 reference implementation, I thought it might be helpful to share my experiences. Therefore, I wrote a blog post, which describes what steps I had to take in order to get started with the Bean Validation RI. You can find it here:
http://musingsofaprogrammingaddict.blogspot.com/2009/01/getting-started-with-jsr-303-beans.html
For the RI developers, especially the section "Download and build the JSR 303 RI" might be of interest, as I am describing there some problems I had due to missing version specifications in one POM.
I'd be happy on happy comments, corrections etc.
Greets,
Gunnar