the ApplicationService interface methods should not take the Application as a parameter but either the application ID or the application name

The main issue that this would solve is transaction boundaries. When working in plugins etc. this would be helpful to avoid lazy loading exception from Hibernate.

So instead of loading my application using the ApplicationManager using one transaction and then calling the ApplicationService using another transaction and potentially failing because the application fields have not been all eagerly loaded.

One would only call the ApplicationService with and ID or a name and only one transaction would be used.