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The second major theme of Web Beans is strong typing. The information about the dependencies, interceptors and decorators of a Web Bean, and the information about event consumers for an event producer, is contained in typesafe Java constructs that may be validated by the compiler.
You don't see string-based identifiers in Web Beans code, not because the framework is hiding them from you using clever defaulting rules so-called "configuration by convention" but because there are simply no strings there to begin with!
The obvious benefit of this approach is that any IDE can provide autocompletion, validation and refactoring without the need for special tooling. But there is a second, less-immediately-obvious, benefit. It turns out that when you start thinking of identifying objects, events or interceptors via annotations instead of names, you have an opportunity to lift the semantic level of your code.
Web Beans encourages you develop annotations that model concepts, for example,
@Asynchronous,
@Mock,
@Secure or
@Updated,
instead of using compound names like
asyncPaymentProcessor,
mockPaymentProcessor,
SecurityInterceptor or
DocumentUpdatedEvent.
The annotations are reusable. They help describe common qualities of disparate parts of the system. They help us categorize and understand our code. They help us deal with common concerns in a common way. They make our code more literate and more understandable.
Web Beans stereotypes take this idea a step further. A stereotype models a common role in your application architecture. It encapsulates various properties of the role, including scope, interceptor bindings, deployment type, etc, into a single reusable package.
Even Web Beans XML metadata is strongly typed! There's no compiler for XML, so Web Beans takes advantage of XML schemas to validate the Java types and attributes that appear in XML. This approach turns out to make the XML more literate, just like annotations made our Java code more literate.
We're now ready to meet some more advanced features of Web Beans. Bear in mind that these features exist to make our code both easier to validate and more understandable. Most of the time you don't ever really need to use these features, but if you use them wisely, you'll come to appreciate their power.
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