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The first major theme of CDI is loose coupling. We’ve already seen three means of achieving loose coupling:
These techniques serve to enable loose coupling of client and server. The client is no longer tightly bound to an implementation of an interface, nor is it required to manage the lifecycle of the implementation. This approach lets stateful objects interact as if they were services.
Loose coupling makes a system more dynamic. The system can respond to change in a well-defined manner. In the past, frameworks that attempted to provide the facilities listed above invariably did it by sacrificing type safety (most notably by using XML descriptors). CDI is the first technology, and certainly the first specification in the Java EE platform, that achieves this level of loose coupling in a typesafe way.
CDI provides three extra important facilities that further the goal of loose coupling:
The second major theme of CDI is strong typing. The information about the dependencies, interceptors and decorators of a 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 CDI 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.
CDI encourages you develop annotations that model concepts, for example,
@Asynchronous,@Mock,@Secure or@Updated,instead of using compound names like
asyncPaymentProcessor,mockPaymentProcessor,SecurityInterceptor orDocumentUpdatedEvent.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.
CDI 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, qualifiers, etc, into a single reusable package. (Of course, there is also the benefit of tucking some of those annotations away).
We’re now ready to meet some more advanced features of CDI. 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.