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Weld 3.0.5.Final - CDI Reference Implementation

CDI: Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE platform


A note about naming and nomenclature
I. Beans
1. Introduction
1.1. What is a bean?
1.2. Getting our feet wet
2. More about beans
2.1. The anatomy of a bean
2.1.1. Bean types, qualifiers and dependency injection
2.1.2. Scope
2.1.3. EL name
2.1.4. Alternatives
2.1.5. Interceptor binding types
2.2. What kinds of classes are beans?
2.2.1. Managed beans
2.2.2. Session beans
2.2.3. Producer methods
2.2.4. Producer fields
3. JSF web application example
4. Dependency injection and programmatic lookup
4.1. Injection points
4.2. What gets injected
4.3. Qualifier annotations
4.4. The built-in qualifiers @Default and @Any
4.5. Qualifiers with members
4.6. Multiple qualifiers
4.7. Alternatives
4.8. Fixing unsatisfied and ambiguous dependencies
4.9. Client proxies
4.10. Obtaining a contextual instance by programmatic lookup
4.10.1. Enhanced version of javax.enterprise.inject.Instance
4.11. The InjectionPoint object
5. Scopes and contexts
5.1. Scope types
5.2. Built-in scopes
5.3. The conversation scope
5.3.1. Conversation demarcation
5.3.2. Conversation propagation
5.3.3. Conversation timeout
5.3.4. CDI Conversation filter
5.3.5. Lazy and eager conversation context initialization
5.4. The singleton pseudo-scope
5.5. The dependent pseudo-scope
II. Getting Start with Weld, the CDI Reference Implementation
6. Getting started with Weld
6.1. Prerequisites
6.2. First try
6.3. Deploying to WildFly
6.4. Deploying to GlassFish
6.5. Deploying to Apache Tomcat
7. Diving into the Weld examples
7.1. The numberguess example in depth
7.1.1. The numberguess example in Apache Tomcat or Jetty
7.2. The numberguess example for Java SE with Swing
7.2.1. Creating the Eclipse project
7.2.2. Running the example from Eclipse
7.2.3. Running the example from the command line
7.2.4. Understanding the code
7.3. The translator example in depth
III. Loose coupling with strong typing
8. Producer methods
8.1. Scope of a producer method
8.2. Injection into producer methods
8.3. Disposer methods
9. Interceptors
9.1. Interceptor bindings
9.2. Implementing interceptors
9.3. Enabling interceptors
9.4. Interceptor bindings with members
9.5. Multiple interceptor binding annotations
9.6. Interceptor binding type inheritance
9.7. Use of @Interceptors
9.8. Enhanced version of javax.interceptor.InvocationContext
10. Decorators
10.1. Delegate object
10.2. Enabling decorators
11. Events
11.1. Event payload
11.2. Event observers
11.3. Event producers
11.3.1. Synchronous event producers
11.3.2. Asynchronous event producers
11.3.3. Applying qualifiers to event
11.4. Conditional observer methods
11.5. Event qualifiers with members
11.6. Multiple event qualifiers
11.7. Transactional observers
11.8. Enhanced version of javax.enterprise.event.Event
12. Stereotypes
12.1. Default scope for a stereotype
12.2. Interceptor bindings for stereotypes
12.3. Name defaulting with stereotypes
12.4. Alternative stereotypes
12.5. Stereotype stacking
12.6. Built-in stereotypes
13. Specialization, inheritance and alternatives
13.1. Using alternative stereotypes
13.2. A minor problem with alternatives
13.3. Using specialization
14. Java EE component environment resources
14.1. Defining a resource
14.2. Typesafe resource injection
IV. CDI and the Java EE ecosystem
15. Java EE integration
15.1. Built-in beans
15.2. Injecting Java EE resources into a bean
15.3. Calling a bean from a servlet
15.4. Calling a bean from a message-driven bean
15.5. JMS endpoints
15.6. Packaging and deployment
15.6.1. Explicit bean archive
15.6.2. Implicit bean archive
15.6.3. Which archive is not a bean archive
15.6.4. Embeddable EJB container
16. Portable extensions
16.1. Creating an Extension
16.2. Container lifecycle events
16.2.1. Configurators
16.2.2. Weld-enriched container lifecycle events
16.3. The BeanManager object
16.4. The CDI class
16.5. The InjectionTarget interface
16.6. The Bean interface
16.7. Registering a Bean
16.8. Configuring an AnnotatedType
16.9. Overriding attributes of a bean
16.10. Wrapping an InjectionTarget
16.11. Overriding InjectionPoint
16.12. Manipulating interceptors, decorators and alternatives enabled for an application
16.13. The Context and AlterableContext interfaces
17. Next steps
V. Weld Reference Guide
18. Application servers and environments supported by Weld
18.1. Using Weld with WildFly
18.2. GlassFish
18.3. Servlet containers (such as Tomcat or Jetty)
18.3.1. Tomcat
18.3.2. Jetty
18.3.3. Undertow
18.3.4. WildFly Web
18.3.5. Bean Archive Isolation
18.3.6. Implicit Bean Archive Support
18.3.7. Servlet Container Detection
18.4. Java SE
18.4.1. CDI SE Module
18.4.2. Bootstrapping CDI SE
18.4.3. Request Context
18.4.4. Thread Context
18.4.5. Setting the Classpath
18.4.6. Bean Archive Isolation
18.4.7. Implicit Bean Archive Support
18.5. Weld SE and Weld Servlet cooperation
18.6. OSGi
19. Configuration
19.1. Weld configuration
19.1.1. Relaxed construction
19.1.2. Concurrent deployment configuration
19.1.3. Thread pool configuration
19.1.4. Non-portable mode during application initialization
19.1.5. Proxying classes with final methods
19.1.6. Bounding the cache size for resolved injection points
19.1.7. Debugging generated bytecode
19.1.8. Injectable reference lookup optimization
19.1.9. Bean identifier index optimization
19.1.10. Rolling upgrades ID delimiter
19.1.11. Development Mode
19.1.12. Conversation timeout and Conversation concurrent access timeout
19.1.13. Veto types without bean defining annotation
19.1.14. Memory consumption optimization - removing unused beans
19.2. Defining external configuration
19.3. Excluding classes from scanning and deployment
19.4. Mapping CDI contexts to HTTP requests
20. Logging
20.1. Java EE containers
20.2. Servlet containers
20.3. Weld SE
21. Development Mode
21.1. How to enable the development mode
21.1.1. Web application
21.1.2. Weld SE
21.1.3. Is The Development Mode Enabled?
21.2. Development Tools
21.2.1. Probe
21.2.2. Validation Report
22. Context Management
22.1. Managing the built in contexts
A. Integrating Weld into other environments
A.1. The Weld SPI
A.1.1. Deployment structure
A.1.2. EJB descriptors
A.1.3. EE resource injection and resolution services
A.1.4. EJB services
A.1.5. JPA services
A.1.6. Transaction Services
A.1.7. Resource Services
A.1.8. Web Service Injection Services
A.1.9. Injection Services
A.1.10. Security Services
A.1.11. Initialization and shutdown
A.1.12. Resource loading
A.1.13. ClassFileServices
A.1.14. Registering services
A.2. The contract with the container
A.2.1. Classloader isolation
A.2.2. Servlet
A.2.3. CDI Conversation Filter
A.2.4. JSF
A.2.5. JSP
A.2.6. Session Bean Interceptor
A.2.7. The weld-core.jar
A.2.8. Binding the manager in JNDI
A.2.9. CDIProvider
A.2.10. Performing CDI injection on Java EE component classes
A.2.11. Around-construct interception
A.2.12. Probe Development Tool (Optional)
A.2.13. Optimized cleanup after bootstrap
A.3. Migration notes
A.3.1. Migration from Weld 1.x to 2.0
A.3.2. Migration from Weld 2.0 to 2.1
A.3.3. Migration from Weld 2.1 to 2.2
A.3.4. Migration from Weld 2.2 to 2.3
A.3.5. Migration from Weld 2.3 to 2.4
A.3.6. Migration from Weld 2.4 to 3.0

Throughout this document, mentions of JSR-299, JSR-346 and JSR-365 appear. JSR is a document of a proposed specification used in the Java Community Process (JCP). JSRs are somewhat analogous to RFCs used by IETF. JSR-299 and JSR-346 are the JCP specification names for the 1.0 and 1.1 versions of CDI, respectively. JSR-365 is the JCP specification name for the CDI 2.0 version.

Shortly before the final draft of JSR-299 was submitted, the specification changed its name from "Web Beans" to "Java Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE platform", abbreviated CDI. For a brief period after the renaming, the reference implementation adopted the name "Web Beans". However, this ended up causing more confusion than it solved and Red Hat decided to change the name of the reference implementation to "Weld". You may still find other documentation, blogs, forum posts, etc. that use the old nomenclature. Please update any references you can. The naming game is over.

You’ll also find that some of the functionality that once existed in the specification is now missing, such as defining beans in XML. These features will be available as portable extensions.

Note that this reference guide was started while changes were still being made to the specification. We’ve done our best to update it for accuracy. If you discover a conflict between what is written in this guide and the specification, the specification is the authority—assume it is correct. If you believe you have found an error in the specification, please report it to the CDI EG.

The CDI specification defines a set of complementary services that help improve the structure of application code. CDI layers an enhanced lifecycle and interaction model over existing Java component types, including managed beans and Enterprise Java Beans. The CDI services provide:

  • an improved lifecycle for stateful objects, bound to well-defined contexts,
  • a typesafe approach to dependency injection,
  • object interaction via an event notification facility,
  • a better approach to binding interceptors to objects, along with a new kind of interceptor, called a decorator, that is more appropriate for use in solving business problems, and
  • an SPI for developing portable extensions to the container.

The CDI services are a core aspect of the Java EE platform and include full support for Java EE modularity and the Java EE component architecture. But the specification does not limit the use of CDI to the Java EE environment. Starting with CDI 2.0, the specification covers the use of CDI in the Java SE environment as well. In Java SE, the services might be provided by a standalone CDI implementation like Weld (see Section 18.4.1, “CDI SE Module”), or even by a container that also implements the subset of EJB defined for embedded usage by the EJB 3.2 specification. CDI is especially useful in the context of web application development, but the problems it solves are general development concerns and it is therefore applicable to a wide variety of application.

An object bound to a lifecycle context is called a bean. CDI includes built-in support for several different kinds of bean, including the following Java EE component types:

  • managed beans, and
  • EJB session beans.

Both managed beans and EJB session beans may inject other beans. But some other objects, which are not themselves beans in the sense used here, may also have beans injected via CDI. In the Java EE platform, the following kinds of component may have beans injected:

  • message-driven beans,
  • interceptors,
  • servlets, servlet filters and servlet event listeners,
  • JAX-WS service endpoints and handlers,
  • JAX-RS resources, providers and javax.ws.rs.core.Application subclasses, and
  • JSP tag handlers and tag library event listeners.

CDI relieves the user of an unfamiliar API of the need to answer the following questions:

  • What is the lifecycle of this object?
  • How many simultaneous clients can it have?
  • Is it multithreaded?
  • How do I get access to it from a client?
  • Do I need to explicitly destroy it?
  • Where should I keep the reference to it when I’m not currently using it?
  • How can I define an alternative implementation, so that the implementation can vary at deployment time?
  • How should I go about sharing this object between other objects?

CDI is more than a framework. It’s a whole, rich programming model. The theme of CDI is loose-coupling with strong typing. Let’s study what that phrase means.

A bean specifies only the type and semantics of other beans it depends upon. It need not be aware of the actual lifecycle, concrete implementation, threading model or other clients of any bean it interacts with. Even better, the concrete implementation, lifecycle and threading model of a bean may vary according to the deployment scenario, without affecting any client. This loose-coupling makes your code easier to maintain.

Events, interceptors and decorators enhance the loose-coupling inherent in this model:

  • event notifications decouple event producers from event consumers,
  • interceptors decouple technical concerns from business logic, and
  • decorators allow business concerns to be compartmentalized.

What’s even more powerful (and comforting) is that CDI provides all these facilities in a typesafe way. CDI never relies on string-based identifiers to determine how collaborating objects fit together. Instead, CDI uses the typing information that is already available in the Java object model, augmented using a new programming pattern, called qualifier annotations, to wire together beans, their dependencies, their interceptors and decorators, and their event consumers. Usage of XML descriptors is minimized to truly deployment-specific information.

But CDI isn’t a restrictive programming model. It doesn’t tell you how you should to structure your application into layers, how you should handle persistence, or what web framework you have to use. You’ll have to decide those kinds of things for yourself.

CDI even provides a comprehensive SPI, allowing other kinds of object defined by future Java EE specifications or by third-party frameworks to be cleanly integrated with CDI, take advantage of the CDI services, and interact with any other kind of bean.

CDI was influenced by a number of existing Java frameworks, including Seam, Guice and Spring. However, CDI has its own, very distinct, character: more typesafe than Seam, more stateful and less XML-centric than Spring, more web and enterprise-application capable than Guice. But it couldn’t have been any of these without inspiration from the frameworks mentioned and lots of collaboration and hard work by the JSR-299 and JSR-346 Expert Groups (EG).

Finally, CDI is a Java Community Process (JCP) standard. Java EE 7 requires that all compliant application servers provide support for JSR-346 (even in the web profile).

So you’re keen to get started writing your first bean? Or perhaps you’re skeptical, wondering what kinds of hoops the CDI specification will make you jump through! The good news is that you’ve probably already written and used hundreds, perhaps thousands of beans. CDI just makes it easier to actually use them to build an application!

A bean is exactly what you think it is. Only now, it has a true identity in the container environment.

Prior to Java EE 6, there was no clear definition of the term "bean" in the Java EE platform. Of course, we’ve been calling Java classes used in web and enterprise applications "beans" for years. There were even a couple of different kinds of things called "beans" in EE specifications, including EJB beans and JSF managed beans. Meanwhile, other third-party frameworks such as Spring and Seam introduced their own ideas of what it meant to be a "bean". What we’ve been missing is a common definition.

Java EE 6 finally laid down that common definition in the Managed Beans specification. Managed Beans are defined as container-managed objects with minimal programming restrictions, otherwise known by the acronym POJO (Plain Old Java Object). They support a small set of basic services, such as resource injection, lifecycle callbacks and interceptors. Companion specifications, such as EJB and CDI, build on this basic model. But, at last, there’s a uniform concept of a bean and a lightweight component model that’s aligned across the Java EE platform.

With very few exceptions, almost every concrete Java class that has a constructor with no parameters (or a constructor designated with the annotation @Inject) is a bean. This includes every JavaBean and every EJB session bean. If you’ve already got some JavaBeans or session beans lying around, they’re already beans—you won’t need any additional special metadata.

The JavaBeans and EJBs you’ve been writing every day, up until now, have not been able to take advantage of the new services defined by the CDI specification. But you’ll be able to use every one of them with CDI—allowing the container to create and destroy instances of your beans and associate them with a designated context, injecting them into other beans, using them in EL expressions, specializing them with qualifier annotations, even adding interceptors and decorators to them—without modifying your existing code. At most, you’ll need to add some annotations.

Now let’s see how to create your first bean that actually uses CDI.

Suppose that we have two existing Java classes that we’ve been using for years in various applications. The first class parses a string into a list of sentences:

public class SentenceParser {

   public List<String> parse(String text) { ... }
}

The second existing class is a stateless session bean front-end for an external system that is able to translate sentences from one language to another:

@Stateless

public class SentenceTranslator implements Translator {
   public String translate(String sentence) { ... }
}

Where Translator is the EJB local interface:

@Local

public interface Translator {
   public String translate(String sentence);
}

Unfortunately, we don’t have a class that translates whole text documents. So let’s write a bean for this job:

public class TextTranslator {

   private SentenceParser sentenceParser;
   private Translator sentenceTranslator;
   @Inject
   TextTranslator(SentenceParser sentenceParser, Translator sentenceTranslator) {
      this.sentenceParser = sentenceParser;
      this.sentenceTranslator = sentenceTranslator;
   }
   public String translate(String text) {
      StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
      for (String sentence: sentenceParser.parse(text)) {
          sb.append(sentenceTranslator.translate(sentence));
      }
      return sb.toString();
   }
}

But wait! TextTranslator does not have a constructor with no parameters! Is it still a bean? If you remember, a class that does not have a constructor with no parameters can still be a bean if it has a constructor annotated @Inject.

As you’ve guessed, the @Inject annotation has something to do with dependency injection! @Inject may be applied to a constructor or method of a bean, and tells the container to call that constructor or method when instantiating the bean. The container will inject other beans into the parameters of the constructor or method.

We may obtain an instance of TextTranslator by injecting it into a constructor, method or field of a bean, or a field or method of a Java EE component class such as a servlet. The container chooses the object to be injected based on the type of the injection point, not the name of the field, method or parameter.

Let’s create a UI controller bean that uses field injection to obtain an instance of the TextTranslator, translating the text entered by a user:

@Named @RequestScoped

public class TranslateController {
   @Inject TextTranslator textTranslator; 
1
   private String inputText;
   private String translation;
   // JSF action method, perhaps
   public void translate() {
      translation = textTranslator.translate(inputText);
   }
   public String getInputText() {
      return inputText;
   }
   public void setInputText(String text) {
      this.inputText = text;
   }
   public String getTranslation() {
      return translation;
   }
}

1

Field injection of TextTranslator instance

Alternatively, we may obtain an instance of TextTranslator programmatically from an injected instance of Instance, parameterized with the bean type:

import javax.enterprise.inject.Instance;

import javax.inject.Inject;
....
@Inject Instance<TextTranslator> textTranslatorInstance;
...
public void translate() {
   textTranslatorInstance.get().translate(inputText);
}

Notice that it isn’t necessary to create a getter or setter method to inject one bean into another. CDI can access an injected field directly (even if it’s private!), which sometimes helps eliminate some wasteful code. The name of the field is arbitrary. It’s the field’s type that determines what is injected.

At system initialization time, the container must validate that exactly one bean exists which satisfies each injection point. In our example, if no implementation of Translator is available—if the SentenceTranslator EJB was not deployed—the container would inform us of an unsatisfied dependency. If more than one implementation of Translator were available, the container would inform us of the ambiguous dependency.

Before we get too deep in the details, let’s pause and examine a bean’s anatomy. What aspects of the bean are significant, and what gives it its identity? Instead of just giving examples of beans, we’re going to define what makes something a bean.

A bean is usually an application class that contains business logic. It may be called directly from Java code, or it may be invoked via the Unified EL. A bean may access transactional resources. Dependencies between beans are managed automatically by the container. Most beans are stateful and contextual. The lifecycle of a bean is managed by the container.

Let’s back up a second. What does it really mean to be contextual? Since beans may be stateful, it matters which bean instance I have. Unlike a stateless component model (for example, stateless session beans) or a singleton component model (such as servlets, or singleton beans), different clients of a bean see the bean in different states. The client-visible state depends upon which instance of the bean the client has a reference to.

However, like a stateless or singleton model, but unlike stateful session beans, the client does not control the lifecycle of the instance by explicitly creating and destroying it. Instead, the scope of the bean determines:

  • the lifecycle of each instance of the bean and
  • which clients share a reference to a particular instance of the bean.

For a given thread in a CDI application, there may be an active context associated with the scope of the bean. This context may be unique to the thread (for example, if the bean is request scoped), or it may be shared with certain other threads (for example, if the bean is session scoped) or even all other threads (if it is application scoped).

Clients (for example, other beans) executing in the same context will see the same instance of the bean. But clients in a different context may see a different instance (depending on the relationship between the contexts).

One great advantage of the contextual model is that it allows stateful beans to be treated like services! The client need not concern itself with managing the lifecycle of the bean it’s using, nor does it even need to know what that lifecycle is. Beans interact by passing messages, and the bean implementations define the lifecycle of their own state. The beans are loosely coupled because:

  • they interact via well-defined public APIs
  • their lifecycles are completely decoupled

We can replace one bean with another different bean that implements the same interface and has a different lifecycle (a different scope) without affecting the other bean implementation. In fact, CDI defines a simple facility for overriding bean implementations at deployment time, as we will see in Section 4.7, “Alternatives”.

Note that not all clients of a bean are beans themselves. Other objects such as servlets or message-driven beans—which are by nature not injectable, contextual objects—may also obtain references to beans by injection.

Enough hand-waving. More formally, the anatomy of a bean, according to the spec:

Let’s see what all this new terminology means.

Beans usually acquire references to other beans via dependency injection. Any injected attribute specifies a "contract" that must be satisfied by the bean to be injected. The contract is:

A bean type is a user-defined class or interface; a type that is client-visible. If the bean is an EJB session bean, the bean type is the @Local interface or bean-class local view. A bean may have multiple bean types. For example, the following bean has four bean types:

public class BookShop

      extends Business
      implements Shop<Book> {
   ...
}

The bean types are BookShop, Business and Shop<Book>, as well as the implicit type java.lang.Object. (Notice that a parameterized type is a legal bean type).

Meanwhile, this session bean has only the local interfaces BookShop, Auditable and java.lang.Object as bean types, since the bean class, BookShopBean is not a client-visible type.

@Stateful

public class BookShopBean
      extends Business
      implements BookShop, Auditable {
   ...
}

Bean types may be restricted to an explicit set by annotating the bean with the @Typed annotation and listing the classes that should be bean types. For instance, the bean types of this bean have been restricted to Shop<Book>, together with java.lang.Object:

@Typed(Shop.class)

public class BookShop
      extends Business
      implements Shop<Book> {
   ...
}

Sometimes, a bean type alone does not provide enough information for the container to know which bean to inject. For instance, suppose we have two implementations of the PaymentProcessor interface: CreditCardPaymentProcessor and DebitPaymentProcessor. Injecting a field of type PaymentProcessor introduces an ambiguous condition. In these cases, the client must specify some additional quality of the implementation it is interested in. We model this kind of "quality" using a qualifier.

A qualifier is a user-defined annotation that is itself annotated @Qualifier. A qualifier annotation is an extension of the type system. It lets us disambiguate a type without having to fall back to string-based names. Here’s an example of a qualifier annotation:

@Qualifier

@Target({TYPE, METHOD, PARAMETER, FIELD})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
public @interface CreditCard {}

You may not be used to seeing the definition of an annotation. In fact, this might be the first time you’ve encountered one. With CDI, annotation definitions will become a familiar artifact as you’ll be creating them from time to time.

Note

Pay attention to the names of the built-in annotations in CDI and EJB. You’ll notice that they are often adjectives. We encourage you to follow this convention when creating your custom annotations, since they serve to describe the behaviors and roles of the class.

Now that we have defined a qualifier annotation, we can use it to disambiguate an injection point. The following injection point has the bean type PaymentProcessor and qualifier @CreditCard:

@Inject @CreditCard PaymentProcessor paymentProcessor

For each injection point, the container searches for a bean which satisfies the contract, one which has the bean type and all the qualifiers. If it finds exactly one matching bean, it injects an instance of that bean. If it doesn’t, it reports an error to the user.

How do we specify that qualifiers of a bean? By annotating the bean class, of course! The following bean has the qualifier @CreditCard and implements the bean type PaymentProcessor. Therefore, it satisfies our qualified injection point:

@CreditCard

public class CreditCardPaymentProcessor
    implements PaymentProcessor { ... }

Note

If a bean or an injection point does not explicitly specify a qualifier, it has the default qualifier, @Default.

That’s not quite the end of the story. CDI also defines a simple resolution rule that helps the container decide what to do if there is more than one bean that satisfies a particular contract. We’ll get into the details in Chapter 4, Dependency injection and programmatic lookup.

You might be familiar with the use of interceptors in EJB 3. Since Java EE 6, this functionality has been generalized to work with other managed beans. That’s right, you no longer have to make your bean an EJB just to intercept its methods. Holler. So what does CDI have to offer above and beyond that? Well, quite a lot actually. Let’s cover some background.

The way that interceptors were defined in Java EE 5 was counter-intuitive. You were required to specify the implementation of the interceptor directly on the implementation of the EJB, either in the @Interceptors annotation or in the XML descriptor. You might as well just put the interceptor code in the implementation! Furthermore, the order in which the interceptors are applied is taken from the order in which they are declared in the annotation or the XML descriptor. Perhaps this isn’t so bad if you’re applying the interceptors to a single bean. But, if you are applying them repeatedly, then there’s a good chance that you’ll inadvertently define a different order for different beans. Now that’s a problem.

CDI provides a new approach to binding interceptors to beans that introduces a level of indirection (and thus control). We must define an interceptor binding type to describe the behavior implemented by the interceptor.

An interceptor binding type is a user-defined annotation that is itself annotated @InterceptorBinding. It lets us bind interceptor classes to bean classes with no direct dependency between the two classes.

@InterceptorBinding

@Inherited
@Target( { TYPE, METHOD })
@Retention(RUNTIME)
public @interface Transactional {}

The interceptor that implements transaction management declares this annotation:

public @Transactional @Interceptor

class TransactionInterceptor { ... }

We can apply the interceptor to a bean by annotating the bean class with the same interceptor binding type:

public @SessionScoped @Transactional

class ShoppingCart implements Serializable { ... }

Notice that ShoppingCart and TransactionInterceptor don’t know anything about each other.

Interceptors are deployment-specific. (We don’t need a TransactionInterceptor in our unit tests!) By default, an interceptor is disabled. We can enable an interceptor using the CDI deployment descriptor META-INF/beans.xml of the jar or Java EE module. This is also where we specify the interceptor ordering. Better still, we can use @Priority annotation to enable the interceptor and define it’s ordering at the same time.

We’ll discuss interceptors, and their cousins, decorators, in Chapter 9, Interceptors and Chapter 10, Decorators.

We’ve already seen two types of beans: JavaBeans and EJB session beans. Is that the whole story? Actually, it’s just the beginning. Let’s explore the various kinds of beans that CDI implementations must support out-of-the-box.

A managed bean is a Java class. The basic lifecycle and semantics of a managed bean are defined by the Managed Beans specification. You can explicitly declare a managed bean by annotating the bean class @ManagedBean, but in CDI you don’t need to. According to the specification, the CDI container treats any class that satisfies the following conditions as a managed bean:

The unrestricted set of bean types for a managed bean contains the bean class, every superclass and all interfaces it implements directly or indirectly.

If a managed bean has a public field, it must have the default scope @Dependent.

Managed beans support the @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy lifecycle callbacks.

Session beans are also, technically, managed beans. However, since they have their own special lifecycle and take advantage of additional enterprise services, the CDI specification considers them to be a different kind of bean.

Session beans belong to the EJB specification. They have a special lifecycle, state management and concurrency model that is different to other managed beans and non-managed Java objects. But session beans participate in CDI just like any other bean. You can inject one session bean into another session bean, a managed bean into a session bean, a session bean into a managed bean, have a managed bean observe an event raised by a session bean, and so on.

The unrestricted set of bean types for a session bean contains all local interfaces of the bean and their superinterfaces. If the session bean has a bean class local view, the unrestricted set of bean types contains the bean class and all superclasses. In addition, java.lang.Object is a bean type of every session bean. But remote interfaces are not included in the set of bean types.

There’s no reason to explicitly declare the scope of a stateless session bean or singleton session bean. The EJB container controls the lifecycle of these beans, according to the semantics of the @Stateless or @Singleton declaration. On the other hand, a stateful session bean may have any scope.

Stateful session beans may define a remove method, annotated @Remove, that is used by the application to indicate that an instance should be destroyed. However, for a contextual instance of the bean—an instance under the control of CDI—this method may only be called by the application if the bean has scope @Dependent. For beans with other scopes, the application must let the container destroy the bean.

So, when should we use a session bean instead of a plain managed bean? Whenever we need the advanced enterprise services offered by EJB, such as:

When we don’t need any of these things, an ordinary managed bean will serve just fine.

Many beans (including any @SessionScoped or @ApplicationScoped beans) are available for concurrent access. Therefore, the concurrency management provided by EJB 3.2 is especially useful. Most session and application scoped beans should be EJBs.

Beans which hold references to heavy-weight resources, or hold a lot of internal state benefit from the advanced container-managed lifecycle defined by the EJB stateless/stateful/singleton model, with its support for passivation and instance pooling.

Finally, it’s usually obvious when method-level transaction management, method-level security, timers, remote methods or asynchronous methods are needed.

The point we’re trying to make is: use a session bean when you need the services it provides, not just because you want to use dependency injection, lifecycle management, or interceptors. Java EE 7 provides a graduated programming model. It’s usually easy to start with an ordinary managed bean, and later turn it into an EJB just by adding one of the following annotations: @Stateless, @Stateful or @Singleton.

On the other hand, don’t be scared to use session beans just because you’ve heard your friends say they’re "heavyweight". It’s nothing more than superstition to think that something is "heavier" just because it’s hosted natively within the Java EE container, instead of by a proprietary bean container or dependency injection framework that runs as an additional layer of obfuscation. And as a general principle, you should be skeptical of folks who use vaguely defined terminology like "heavyweight".

Not everything that needs to be injected can be boiled down to a bean class instantiated by the container using new. There are plenty of cases where we need additional control. What if we need to decide at runtime which implementation of a type to instantiate and inject? What if we need to inject an object that is obtained by querying a service or transactional resource, for example by executing a JPA query?

A producer method is a method that acts as a source of bean instances. The method declaration itself describes the bean and the container invokes the method to obtain an instance of the bean when no instance exists in the specified context. A producer method lets the application take full control of the bean instantiation process.

A producer method is declared by annotating a method of a bean class with the @Produces annotation.

import javax.enterprise.inject.Produces;


@ApplicationScoped
public class RandomNumberGenerator {
   private java.util.Random random = new java.util.Random(System.currentTimeMillis());
   @Produces @Named @Random int getRandomNumber() {
      return random.nextInt(100);
   }
}

We can’t write a bean class that is itself a random number. But we can certainly write a method that returns a random number. By making the method a producer method, we allow the return value of the method—in this case an Integer—to be injected. We can even specify a qualifier—in this case @Random, a scope—which in this case defaults to @Dependent, and an EL name—which in this case defaults to randomNumber according to the JavaBeans property name convention. Now we can get a random number anywhere:

@Inject @Random int randomNumber;

Even in a Unified EL expression:


<p>Your raffle number is #{randomNumber}.</p>

A producer method must be a non-abstract method of a managed bean class or session bean class. A producer method may be either static or non-static. If the bean is a session bean, the producer method must be either a business method of the EJB or a static method of the bean class.

The bean types of a producer method depend upon the method return type:

If the producer method has method parameters, the container will look for a bean that satisfies the type and qualifiers of each parameter and pass it to the method automatically—another form of dependency injection.

@Produces Set<Roles> getRoles(User user) {

   return user.getRoles();
}

We’ll talk much more about producer methods in Chapter 8, Producer methods.

Let’s illustrate these ideas with a full example. We’re going to implement user login/logout for an application that uses JSF. First, we’ll define a request-scoped bean to hold the username and password entered during login, with constraints defined using annotations from the Bean Validation specification:

@Named @RequestScoped

public class Credentials {
    private String username;
    private String password;
    @NotNull @Length(min=3, max=25)
    public String getUsername() { return username; }
    public void setUsername(String username) { this.username = username; }
    @NotNull @Length(min=6, max=20)
    public String getPassword() { return password; }
    public void setPassword(String password) { this.password = password; }
}

This bean is bound to the login prompt in the following JSF form:


<h:form>
   <h:panelGrid columns="2" rendered="#{!login.loggedIn}">
      <f:validateBean>
         <h:outputLabel for="username">Username:</h:outputLabel>
         <h:inputText id="username" value="#{credentials.username}"/>
         <h:outputLabel for="password">Password:</h:outputLabel>
         <h:inputSecret id="password" value="#{credentials.password}"/>
      </f:validateBean>
   </h:panelGrid>
   <h:commandButton value="Login" action="#{login.login}" rendered="#{!login.loggedIn}"/>
   <h:commandButton value="Logout" action="#{login.logout}" rendered="#{login.loggedIn}"/>
</h:form>

Users are represented by a JPA entity:

@Entity

public class User {
   private @NotNull @Length(min=3, max=25) @Id String username;
   private @NotNull @Length(min=6, max=20) String password;
   public String getUsername() { return username; }
   public void setUsername(String username) { this.username = username; }
   public String setPassword(String password) { this.password = password; }
}

(Note that we’re also going to need a persistence.xml file to configure the JPA persistence unit containing User.)

The actual work is done by a session-scoped bean that maintains information about the currently logged-in user and exposes the User entity to other beans:

@SessionScoped @Named

public class Login implements Serializable {
   @Inject Credentials credentials;
   @Inject @UserDatabase EntityManager userDatabase;
   private User user;
   public void login() {
      List<User> results = userDatabase.createQuery(
         "select u from User u where u.username = :username and u.password = :password")
         .setParameter("username", credentials.getUsername())
         .setParameter("password", credentials.getPassword())
         .getResultList();
      if (!results.isEmpty()) {
         user = results.get(0);
      }
      else {
         // perhaps add code here to report a failed login
      }
   }
   public void logout() {
      user = null;
   }
   public boolean isLoggedIn() {
      return user != null;
   }
   @Produces @LoggedIn User getCurrentUser() {
      return user;
   }
}

@LoggedIn and @UserDatabase are custom qualifier annotations:

@Qualifier

@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Target({TYPE, METHOD, PARAMETER, FIELD})
public @interface LoggedIn {}
@Qualifier

@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Target({METHOD, PARAMETER, FIELD})
public @interface UserDatabase {}

We need an adaptor bean to expose our typesafe EntityManager:

class UserDatabaseProducer {

   @Produces @UserDatabase @PersistenceContext
   static EntityManager userDatabase;
}

Now DocumentEditor, or any other bean, can easily inject the current user:

public class DocumentEditor {

   @Inject Document document;
   @Inject @LoggedIn User currentUser;
   @Inject @DocumentDatabase EntityManager docDatabase;
   public void save() {
      document.setCreatedBy(currentUser);
      docDatabase.persist(document);
   }
}

Or we can reference the current user in a JSF view:


<h:panelGroup rendered="#{login.loggedIn}">
   signed in as #{currentUser.username}
</h:panelGroup>

Hopefully, this example gave you a taste of the CDI programming model. In the next chapter, we’ll explore dependency injection in greater depth.

One of the most significant features of CDI—certainly the most recognized—is dependency injection; excuse me, typesafe dependency injection.

The @Inject annotation lets us define an injection point that is injected during bean instantiation. Injection can occur via three different mechanisms.

Bean constructor parameter injection:

public class Checkout {


   private final ShoppingCart cart;
   @Inject
   public Checkout(ShoppingCart cart) {
      this.cart = cart;
   }
}

A bean can only have one injectable constructor.

Initializer method parameter injection:

public class Checkout {


   private ShoppingCart cart;
   @Inject
   void setShoppingCart(ShoppingCart cart) {
      this.cart = cart;
   }
}

And direct field injection:

public class Checkout {


   private @Inject ShoppingCart cart;
}

Dependency injection always occurs when the bean instance is first instantiated by the container. Simplifying just a little, things happen in this order:

(The only complication is that the container might call initializer methods declared by a superclass before initializing injected fields declared by a subclass.)

CDI also supports parameter injection for some other methods that are invoked by the container. For instance, parameter injection is supported for producer methods:

@Produces Checkout createCheckout(ShoppingCart cart) {

    return new Checkout(cart);
}

This is a case where the @Inject annotation is not required at the injection point. The same is true for observer methods (which we’ll meet in Chapter 11, Events) and disposer methods.

If we have more than one bean that implements a particular bean type, the injection point can specify exactly which bean should be injected using a qualifier annotation. For example, there might be two implementations of PaymentProcessor:

@Synchronous

public class SynchronousPaymentProcessor implements PaymentProcessor {
   public void process(Payment payment) { ... }
}
@Asynchronous

public class AsynchronousPaymentProcessor implements PaymentProcessor {
   public void process(Payment payment) { ... }
}

Where @Synchronous and @Asynchronous are qualifier annotations:

@Qualifier

@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Target({TYPE, METHOD, FIELD, PARAMETER})
public @interface Synchronous {}
@Qualifier

@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Target({TYPE, METHOD, FIELD, PARAMETER})
public @interface Asynchronous {}

A client bean developer uses the qualifier annotation to specify exactly which bean should be injected.

Using field injection:

@Inject @Synchronous PaymentProcessor syncPaymentProcessor;

@Inject @Asynchronous PaymentProcessor asyncPaymentProcessor;

Using initializer method injection:

@Inject

public void setPaymentProcessors(@Synchronous PaymentProcessor syncPaymentProcessor,
                                 @Asynchronous PaymentProcessor asyncPaymentProcessor) {
   this.syncPaymentProcessor = syncPaymentProcessor;
   this.asyncPaymentProcessor = asyncPaymentProcessor;
}

Using constructor injection:

@Inject

public Checkout(@Synchronous PaymentProcessor syncPaymentProcessor,
                @Asynchronous PaymentProcessor asyncPaymentProcessor) {
   this.syncPaymentProcessor = syncPaymentProcessor;
   this.asyncPaymentProcessor = asyncPaymentProcessor;
}

Qualifier annotations can also qualify method arguments of producer, disposer and observer methods. Combining qualified arguments with producer methods is a good way to have an implementation of a bean type selected at runtime based on the state of the system:

@Produces

PaymentProcessor getPaymentProcessor(@Synchronous PaymentProcessor syncPaymentProcessor,
                                     @Asynchronous PaymentProcessor asyncPaymentProcessor) {
   return isSynchronous() ? syncPaymentProcessor : asyncPaymentProcessor;
}

If an injected field or a parameter of a bean constructor or initializer method is not explicitly annotated with a qualifier, the default qualifier,@Default, is assumed.

Now, you may be thinking, "What’s the different between using a qualifier and just specifying the exact implementation class you want?" It’s important to understand that a qualifier is like an extension of the interface. It does not create a direct dependency to any particular implementation. There may be multiple alternative implementations of @Asynchronous PaymentProcessor!

Alternatives are beans whose implementation is specific to a particular client module or deployment scenario. This alternative defines a mock implementation of both @Synchronous PaymentProcessor and @Asynchronous PaymentProcessor, all in one:

@Alternative @Synchronous @Asynchronous

public class MockPaymentProcessor implements PaymentProcessor {
   public void process(Payment payment) { ... }
}

By default, @Alternative beans are disabled. We need to enable an alternative in the beans.xml descriptor of a bean archive to make it available for instantiation and injection. However, this activation only applies to the beans in that archive.


<beans
   xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_1.xsd">
   <alternatives>
         <class>org.mycompany.mock.MockPaymentProcessor</class>
   </alternatives>
</beans>

From CDI 1.1 onwards the alternative can be enabled for the whole application using @Priority annotation.

@Priority(100) @Alternative @Synchronous @Asynchronous

public class MockPaymentProcessor implements PaymentProcessor {
   public void process(Payment payment) { ... }
}

When an ambiguous dependency exists at an injection point, the container attempts to resolve the ambiguity by looking for an enabled alternative among the beans that could be injected. If there is exactly one enabled alternative, that’s the bean that will be injected. If there are more beans with priority, the one with the highest priority value is selected.

The typesafe resolution algorithm fails when, after considering the qualifier annotations on all beans that implement the bean type of an injection point and filtering out disabled beans (@Alternative beans which are not explicitly enabled), the container is unable to identify exactly one bean to inject. The container will abort deployment, informing us of the unsatisfied or ambiguous dependency.

During the course of your development, you’re going to encounter this situation. Let’s learn how to resolve it.

To fix an unsatisfied dependency, either:

To fix an ambiguous dependency, either:

Just remember: "There can be only one."

On the other hand, if you really do have an optional or multivalued injection point, you should change the type of your injection point to Instance, as we’ll see in Section 4.10, “Obtaining a contextual instance by programmatic lookup”.

Now there’s one more issue you need to be aware of when using the dependency injection service.

Clients of an injected bean do not usually hold a direct reference to a bean instance, unless the bean is a dependent object (scope @Dependent).

Imagine that a bean bound to the application scope held a direct reference to a bean bound to the request scope. The application-scoped bean is shared between many different requests. However, each request should see a different instance of the request scoped bean—the current one!

Now imagine that a bean bound to the session scope holds a direct reference to a bean bound to the application scope. From time to time, the session context is serialized to disk in order to use memory more efficiently. However, the application scoped bean instance should not be serialized along with the session scoped bean! It can get that reference any time. No need to hoard it!

Therefore, unless a bean has the default scope @Dependent, the container must indirect all injected references to the bean through a proxy object. This client proxy is responsible for ensuring that the bean instance that receives a method invocation is the instance that is associated with the current context. The client proxy also allows beans bound to contexts such as the session context to be serialized to disk without recursively serializing other injected beans.

Unfortunately, due to limitations of the Java language, some Java types cannot be proxied by the container. If an injection point declared with one of these types resolves to a bean with any scope other than @Dependent, the container will abort deployment, informing us of the problem.

The following Java types cannot be proxied by the container:

It’s usually very easy to fix an unproxyable dependency problem. If an injection point of type X results in an unproxyable dependency, simply:

In certain situations, injection is not the most convenient way to obtain a contextual reference. For example, it may not be used when:

In these situations, the application may obtain an instance of the interface Instance, parameterized for the bean type, by injection:

@Inject Instance<PaymentProcessor> paymentProcessorSource;

The get() method of Instance produces a contextual instance of the bean.

PaymentProcessor p = paymentProcessorSource.get();

Qualifiers can be specified in one of two ways:

Specifying the qualifiers at the injection point is much, much easier:

@Inject @Asynchronous Instance<PaymentProcessor> paymentProcessorSource;

Now, the PaymentProcessor returned by get() will have the qualifier @Asynchronous.

Alternatively, we can specify the qualifier dynamically. First, we add the @Any qualifier to the injection point, to suppress the default qualifier. (All beans have the qualifier @Any .)

import javax.enterprise.inject.Instance;


...
@Inject @Any Instance<PaymentProcessor> paymentProcessorSource;

Next, we need to obtain an instance of our qualifier type. Since annotations are interfaces, we can’t just write new Asynchronous(). It’s also quite tedious to create a concrete implementation of an annotation type from scratch. Instead, CDI lets us obtain a qualifier instance by subclassing the helper class AnnotationLiteral.

class AsynchronousQualifier

extends AnnotationLiteral<Asynchronous> implements Asynchronous {}

In some cases, we can use an anonymous class:

PaymentProcessor p = paymentProcessorSource

   .select(new AnnotationLiteral<Asynchronous>() {});

However, we can’t use an anonymous class to implement a qualifier type with members.

Now, finally, we can pass the qualifier to the select() method of Instance.

Annotation qualifier = synchronously ?

      new SynchronousQualifier() : new AsynchronousQualifier();
PaymentProcessor p = anyPaymentProcessor.select(qualifier).get().process(payment);

Weld also provides org.jboss.weld.inject.WeldInstance - an enhanced version of javax.enterprise.inject.Instance. There are three additional methods. The first one - getHandler() - allows to obtain a contextual reference handler which not only holds the contextual reference but also allows to inspect the metadata of the relevant bean and to destroy the underlying contextual instance. Moreover, the handler implements AutoCloseable:

import org.jboss.weld.inject.WeldInstance;


class Foo {
  @Inject
  WeldInstance<Bar> instance;
  void doWork() {
    try (Handler<Bar> barHandler = instance.getHandler()) {
        barHandler.get().doBusiness();
        // Note that Bar will be automatically destroyed at the end of the try-with-resources statement
    }
    Handler<Bar> barHandler = instance.getHandler()
    barHandler.get().doBusiness();
    // Calls Instance.destroy()
    barHandler.destroy();
  }
}

The next method - handlers() - returns an Iterable which allows to iterate over handlers for all the beans that have the required type and required qualifiers and are eligible for injection. This might be useful if you need more control inside the loop:

@ApplicationScoped

class OrderService {
  @Inject
  @Any
  WeldInstance<OrderProcessor> instance;
  void create(Order order) {
    for (Handler<OrderProcessor> handler : instance.handlers()) {
            handler.get().process(order);
            if (Dependent.class.equals(handler.getBean().getScope()) {
                // Destroy only dependent processors
                handler.destroy();
            }
        }
    }
  }

Third method is a twist on the select() method, but it accepts java.lang.reflect.Type as parameter and optionally qualifier(s). This allows for generic selection of instances which can be handy while dealing with third party beans through extensions. However, in order to stay type-safe, this method has a limitation - it can only be invoked on WeldInstance<Object>. Invocation on any other type than Object will result in an IllegalStateException. Please note that the return value if such select will always be WeldInstance<Object> unless you specify it further using <SomeType> before invoking this select(). Let’s look at actual code:

class MyCustomExtension implements Extension {


  @Inject
  @Any
  WeldInstance<Object> instance;
  private Set<Type> allTypes = new HashSet<>();
  public void observe(@Observes ProcessBean<?> bean) {
    // gather all bean types, even those that we do not own
    allTypes.add(bean.getAnnotated().getBaseType());
  }
  public void doWorkWithBeans(@Observes AfterDeploymentValidation adv) {
    for (Type t : allTypes) {
      // now we can select based on Type once we are sure all beans are initialized
      instance.select(t).isResolvable() ? logValidBeanFound(t) : logInvalidBeanFound(t);
    }
  }

WeldInstance is automatically available in Weld SE and Weld Servlet where the Weld API is always on the class path. It is also available in Weld-powered EE containers. In this case, users would have to compile their application against the Weld API and exclude the Weld API artifact from the deployment (e.g. use provided scope in Maven).

There are certain kinds of dependent objects (beans with scope @Dependent) that need to know something about the object or injection point into which they are injected in order to be able to do what they do. For example:

A bean with scope @Dependent may inject an instance of InjectionPoint and access metadata relating to the injection point to which it belongs.

Let’s look at an example. The following code is verbose, and vulnerable to refactoring problems:

Logger log = Logger.getLogger(MyClass.class.getName());

This clever little producer method lets you inject a JDK Logger without explicitly specifying the log category:

import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.InjectionPoint;

import javax.enterprise.inject.Produces;
class LogFactory {
   @Produces Logger createLogger(InjectionPoint injectionPoint) {
      return Logger.getLogger(injectionPoint.getMember().getDeclaringClass().getName());
   }
}

We can now write:

@Inject Logger log;

Not convinced? Then here’s a second example. To inject HTTP parameters, we need to define a qualifier type:

@Qualifier

@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Target({TYPE, METHOD, FIELD, PARAMETER})
public @interface HttpParam {
   @Nonbinding public String value();
}

We would use this qualifier type at injection points as follows:

@HttpParam("username") @Inject String username;

@HttpParam("password") @Inject String password;

The following producer method does the work:

import javax.enterprise.inject.Produces;

import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.InjectionPoint;
class HttpParams
   @Produces @HttpParam("")
   String getParamValue(InjectionPoint ip) {
      ServletRequest request = (ServletRequest) FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequest();
      return request.getParameter(ip.getAnnotated().getAnnotation(HttpParam.class).value());
   }
}

Note that acquiring of the request in this example is JSF-centric. For a more generic solution you could write your own producer for the request and have it injected as a method parameter.

Note also that the value() member of the HttpParam annotation is ignored by the container since it is annotated @Nonbinding.

The container provides a built-in bean that implements the InjectionPoint interface:

public interface InjectionPoint {

   public Type getType();
   public Set<Annotation> getQualifiers();
   public Bean<?> getBean();
   public Member getMember();
   public Annotated getAnnotated();
   public boolean isDelegate();
   public boolean isTransient();
}

So far, we’ve seen a few examples of scope type annotations. The scope of a bean determines the lifecycle of instances of the bean. The scope also determines which clients refer to which instances of the bean. According to the CDI specification, a scope determines:

  • When a new instance of any bean with that scope is created
  • When an existing instance of any bean with that scope is destroyed
  • Which injected references refer to any instance of a bean with that scope

For example, if we have a session-scoped bean, CurrentUser, all beans that are called in the context of the same HttpSession will see the same instance of CurrentUser. This instance will be automatically created the first time a CurrentUser is needed in that session, and automatically destroyed when the session ends.

Note

JPA entities aren’t a great fit for this model. Entities have their whole own lifecycle and identity model which just doesn’t map naturally to the model used in CDI. Therefore, we recommend against treating entities as CDI beans. You’re certainly going to run into problems if you try to give an entity a scope other than the default scope @Dependent. The client proxy will get in the way if you try to pass an injected instance to the JPA EntityManager.

The conversation scope is a bit like the traditional session scope in that it holds state associated with a user of the system, and spans multiple requests to the server. However, unlike the session scope, the conversation scope:

A conversation represents a task—a unit of work from the point of view of the user. The conversation context holds state associated with what the user is currently working on. If the user is doing multiple things at the same time, there are multiple conversations.

The conversation context is active during any servlet request (since CDI 1.1). Most conversations are destroyed at the end of the request. If a conversation should hold state across multiple requests, it must be explicitly promoted to a long-running conversation.

CDI provides a built-in bean for controlling the lifecycle of conversations in a CDI application. This bean may be obtained by injection:

@Inject Conversation conversation;

To promote the conversation associated with the current request to a long-running conversation, call the begin() method from application code. To schedule the current long-running conversation context for destruction at the end of the current request, call end().

In the following example, a conversation-scoped bean controls the conversation with which it is associated:

import javax.enterprise.inject.Produces;

import javax.inject.Inject;
import javax.persistence.PersistenceContextType.EXTENDED;
@ConversationScoped @Stateful
public class OrderBuilder {
   private Order order;
   private @Inject Conversation conversation;
   private @PersistenceContext(type = EXTENDED) EntityManager em;
   @Produces public Order getOrder() {
      return order;
   }
   public Order createOrder() {
      order = new Order();
      conversation.begin();
      return order;
   }
   public void addLineItem(Product product, int quantity) {
      order.add(new LineItem(product, quantity));
   }
   public void saveOrder(Order order) {
      em.persist(order);
      conversation.end();
   }
   @Remove
   public void destroy() {}
}

This bean is able to control its own lifecycle through use of the Conversation API. But some other beans have a lifecycle which depends completely upon another object.

The conversation context automatically propagates with any JSF faces request (JSF form submission) or redirect. It does not automatically propagate with non-faces requests, for example, navigation via a link.

We can force the conversation to propagate with a non-faces request by including the unique identifier of the conversation as a request parameter. The CDI specification reserves the request parameter named cid for this use. The unique identifier of the conversation may be obtained from the Conversation object, which has the EL bean name javax.enterprise.context.conversation.

Therefore, the following link propagates the conversation:


<a href="/addProduct.jsp?cid=#{javax.enterprise.context.conversation.id}">Add Product</a>

It’s probably better to use one of the link components in JSF 2:


<h:link outcome="/addProduct.xhtml" value="Add Product">
   <f:param name="cid" value="#{javax.enterprise.context.conversation.id}"/>
</h:link>

In certain scenarios it may be desired to suppress propagation of a long-running conversation. The conversationPropagation request parameter (introduced in CDI 1.1) may be used for this purpose. If the conversationPropagation request parameter has the value none , the container will not reassociate the existing conversation but will instead associate the request with a new transient conversation even though the conversation id was propagated.

The conversation management is not always smooth. For example, if the propagated conversation cannot be restored, the javax.enterprise.context.NonexistentConversationException is thrown. Or if there are concurrent requests for a one long-running conversation, `javax.enterprise.context.BusyConversationException ` is thrown. For such cases, developer has no opportunity to deal with the exception by default, as the conversation associated with a Servlet request is determined at the beginning of the request before calling any service() method of any servlet in the web application, even before calling any of the filters in the web application and before the container calls any ServletRequestListener or AsyncListener in the web application.

To be allowed to handle the exceptions, a filter defined in the CDI 1.1 with the name ` CDI Conversation Filter ` can be used. By mapping the ` CDI Conversation Filter ` in the web.xml just after some other filters, we are able to catch the exceptions in them since the ordering in the web.xml specifies the ordering in which the filters will be called (described in the servlet specification).

In the following example, a filter MyFilter checks for the BusyConversationException thrown during the conversation association. In the web.xml example, the filter is mapped before the CDI Conversation Filter.

public class MyFilter implements Filter {

...
@Override
    public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain)
      throws IOException, ServletException {
        try {
            chain.doFilter(request, response);
        } catch (BusyConversationException e) {
            response.setContentType("text/plain");
            response.getWriter().print("BusyConversationException");
        }
    }
...

To make it work, we need to map our MyFilter before the CDI Conversation Filter in the web.xml file.


<filter-mapping>
      <filter-name>My Filter</filter-name>
      <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
   </filter-mapping>

   <filter-mapping>
      <filter-name>CDI Conversation Filter</filter-name>
      <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
   </filter-mapping>

In addition to the four built-in scopes, CDI also supports two pseudo-scopes. The first is the singleton pseudo-scope, which we specify using the annotation @Singleton.

You can guess what "singleton" means here. It means a bean that is instantiated once. Unfortunately, there’s a little problem with this pseudo-scope. Beans with scope @Singleton don’t have a proxy object. Clients hold a direct reference to the singleton instance. So we need to consider the case of a client that can be serialized, for example, any bean with scope @SessionScoped or @ConversationScoped, any dependent object of a bean with scope @SessionScoped or @ConversationScoped, or any stateful session bean.

Now, if the singleton instance is a simple, immutable, serializable object like a string, a number or a date, we probably don’t mind too much if it gets duplicated via serialization. However, that makes it stop being a true singleton, and we may as well have just declared it with the default scope.

There are several ways to ensure that the singleton bean remains a singleton when its client gets serialized:

A fourth, better solution is to instead use @ApplicationScoped, allowing the container to proxy the bean, and take care of serialization problems automatically.

Finally, CDI features the so-called dependent pseudo-scope. This is the default scope for a bean which does not explicitly declare a scope type.

For example, this bean has the scope type @Dependent:

public class Calculator { ... }

An instance of a dependent bean is never shared between different clients or different injection points. It is strictly a dependent object of some other object. It is instantiated when the object it belongs to is created, and destroyed when the object it belongs to is destroyed.

If a Unified EL expression refers to a dependent bean by EL name, an instance of the bean is instantiated every time the expression is evaluated. The instance is not reused during any other expression evaluation.

Beans with scope @Dependent don’t need a proxy object. The client holds a direct reference to its instance.

CDI makes it easy to obtain a dependent instance of a bean, even if the bean is already declared as a bean with some other scope type.

Weld, the CDI Reference Implementation (RI), can be downloaded from the download page. Information about the Weld source code repository and instructions about how to obtain and build the source can be found on the same page.

Weld provides a complete SPI allowing Java EE containers such as WildFly, GlassFish and WebLogic to use Weld as their built-in CDI implementation. Weld also runs in servlet engines like Tomcat and Jetty, or even in a plain Java SE environment.

Weld comes with an extensive library of examples, which are a great starting point from which to learn CDI. In addition, a number of quickstarts featuring CDI can be found at the JBoss Developer site

Weld comes with a number of examples. We recommend you start with examples/jsf/numberguess and examples/jsf/translator. Numberguess is a web (war) example containing only non-transactional managed beans. This example can be run on a wide range of servers, including WildFly , GlassFish, Apache Tomcat, Jetty, and any compliant Java EE 7 container. Translator is an enterprise (ear) example that contains session beans. This example must be run on WildFly 8 or better, GlassFish 4 or better, or any compliant Java EE 7 container.

Both examples use JSF 2.2 as the web framework and, as such, can be found in the examples/jsf directory of the Weld distribution.

To deploy the examples to a WildFly instance, you’ll need to download WildFly first. The good news is that there are no additional modifications you have to make to the server. It’s ready to go!

After you have downloaded WildFly, extract it. (We recommended renaming the folder to include the as qualifier so it’s clear that it’s the application server). You can move the extracted folder anywhere you like. Wherever it lays to rest, that’s what we’ll call the WildFly installation directory, or JBOSS_HOME.

$> unzip wildfly-10.1.0.Final.zip
$> mv wildfly-10.*/ wildfly-10

In order for the build scripts to know where to deploy the example, you have to tell them where to find your WildFly installation. Set the JBOSS_HOME environment variable to point to the WildFly installation, e.g.:

$> export JBOSS_HOME=/path/to/wildfly

You’re now ready to run your first example!

Switch to the examples/jsf/numberguess directory and execute the Maven deploy target:

$> cd examples/jsf/numberguess
$> mvn wildfly:deploy

Note

If you are using Eclipse, you should seriously consider installing the JBoss Tools add-ons, which include a wide variety of tooling for CDI and Java EE development, as well as an enhanced WildFly server view.

Wait a few seconds for the application to deploy (or the application server to start) and see if you can determine the most efficient approach to pinpoint the random number at the local URL http://localhost:8080/weld-numberguess.

Note

The Maven WildFly plugin includes additional goals for WildFly to deploy and undeploy the archive.

  • mvn wildfly:deploy - deploy the example to a running WildFly instance
  • mvn wildfly:undeploy - undeploy the example from a running WildFly instance
  • mvn wildfly:redeploy - redeploys the example

For more information on the WildFly Maven plugin see the plugin documentation.

You can also run functional tests to verify that the example works as expected. Run:

$> mvn verify -Darquillian=wildfly-managed-8

You should see the following output:

Tests run: 2, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0

The second starter example, weld-translator, will translate your text into Latin. (Well, not really, but the stub is there for you to implement, at least. Good luck!) To try it out, switch to the translator example directory and execute the deploy target:

$> cd examples/jsf/translator/ear
$> mvn jboss-as:run

Note

The translator uses session beans, which are packaged in an EJB module within an ear. Java EE 7 allows session beans to be deployed in war modules, but that’s a topic for a later chapter.

Again, wait a few seconds for the application to deploy (if you’re really bored, read the log messages), and visit http://localhost:8080/weld-translator to begin pseudo-translating.

Again, functional tests can be running by executing:

$> cd examples/jsf/translator/ftest
$> mvn verify -Darquillian=wildfly-managed-8

Deploying to GlassFish should be easy and familiar, right? After all, it’s the Java EE 7 reference implementation and Weld is the CDI reference implementation, meaning Weld gets bundled with GlassFish. So yes, it’s all quite easy and familiar.

To deploy the examples to GlassFish, you’ll need a GlassFish 4.0 release. Select the release that ends in either -unix.sh or -windows.exe depending on your platform. After the download is complete, execute the installer. On Linux/Unix, you’ll need to first make the script executable.

$> chmod 755 glassfish-4.0-unix.sh
$> ./glassfish-4.0-unix.sh

On Windows you can just click on the executable. Follow the instructions in the installer. It will create a single domain named domain1. You’ll use that domain to deploy the example. We recommend that you choose 7070 as the main HTTP port to avoid conflicts with a running instance of WildFly (or Apache Tomcat).

Next, make sure the GLASSFISH_HOME environment variable is set to point to the GlassFish installation.

Now switch to the GLASSFISH_HOME directory and deploy the example.

$> ./bin/asadmin
asadmin> deploy /path/examples/jsf/numberguess/target/weld-numberguess.war

Once the command completes the application is available at http://localhost:7070/weld-numberguess

The reason the same artifact can be deployed to both WildFly and GlassFish, without any modifications, is because all of the features being used are part of the standard platform. And what a capable platform it has become!

Servlet containers are not required to support Java EE services like CDI. However, you can use CDI in a servlet container like Tomcat by embedding a standalone CDI implementation such as Weld.

Weld comes with servlet integration extension which bootstraps the CDI environment and provides injection into servlets components. Basically, it emulates some of the work done by the Java EE container, but you don’t get the enterprise features such as session beans and container-managed transactions.

Let’s give the Weld servlet extension a spin on Apache Tomcat. First, you’ll need to download Tomcat 8.0.42 or later from tomcat.apache.org and extract it.

$> unzip apache-tomcat-8.0.42.zip

The Maven plugin communicates with Tomcat over HTTP, so it doesn’t care where you have installed Tomcat. However, the plugin configuration assumes you are running Tomcat in its default configuration, with a hostname of localhost and port 8080. The readme.txt file in the example directory has information about how to modify the Maven settings to accommodate a different setup.

You can either start Tomcat from a Linux shell:

$> cd /path/to/apache-tomcat-7
$> ./bin/start.sh

a Windows command window:

$> cd c:\path\to\apache-tomcat-7\bin
$> start

or you can start the server using an IDE, like Eclipse.

Change to the examples/jsf/numberguess directory again and run the following Maven command:

$> cd examples/jsf/numberguess
$> mvn clean package -Ptomcat

Now you’re ready to deploy the numberguess example to Tomcat!

$> cp examples/jsf/numberguess/target/weld-numberguess.war apache-tomcat/webapps/

It’s time to pull the covers back and dive into the internals of Weld example applications. Let’s start with the simpler of the two examples, weld-numberguess.

In the numberguess application you get 10 attempts to guess a number between 1 and 100. After each attempt, you’re told whether your guess was too high or too low.

The numberguess example is comprised of a number of beans, configuration files and Facelets (JSF) views, packaged as a war module. Let’s start by examining the configuration files.

All the configuration files for this example are located in WEB-INF/, which can be found in the src/main/webapp directory of the example. First, we have the JSF 2.2 version of faces-config.xml. A standardized version of Facelets is the default view handler in JSF 2.2, so there’s really nothing that we have to configure. Thus, the configuration consists of only the root element.


<faces-config version="2.2"
   xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/web-facesconfig_2_2.xsd">

      <name>numberguess</name>

</faces-config>

There’s also an empty beans.xml file, which tells the container to look for beans in this archive and to activate the CDI services.

Finally, some of the supported servers also need a web.xml which is located in src/main/webapp-[server]/WEB-INF.

Let’s take a look at the main JSF view, src/main/webapp/home.xhtml.


<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
   xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"
   xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"
   xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">

   <ui:composition template="/template.xhtml"> 
1
      <ui:define name="content">
         <h1>Guess a number...</h1>
         <h:form id="numberGuess">
            <div style="color: red">
               <h:messages id="messages" globalOnly="false"/> 
2
               <h:outputText id="Higher" value="Higher!" rendered="#{game.guessLower}"/>
               <h:outputText id="Lower" value="Lower!" rendered="#{game.guessHigher}"/>
            </div>

            <div>
               I'm thinking of a number between
               <span id="numberGuess:smallest">#{game.smallest}</span>
               and <span id="numberGuess:biggest">#{game.biggest}</span>.
               You have #{game.remainingGuesses} guesses remaining. 
3
            </div>

            <div>
               Your guess:
               <h:inputText id="inputGuess" value="#{game.guess}"
                  required="true" size="3" disabled="#{game.guessCorrect}"
                  validator="#{game.validateNumberRange}"/> 
4  
5
               <h:commandButton id="guessButton" value="Guess" action="#{game.check}"
               disabled="#{game.guessCorrect}"/> 
6
            </div>
            <div>
               <h:commandButton id="restartButton" value="Reset" action="#{game.reset}" immediate="true"/>
            </div>
         </h:form>
      </ui:define>
   </ui:composition>
</html>

1

Facelets is the built-in templating language for JSF. Here we are wrapping our page in a template which defines the layout.

2

There are a number of messages which can be sent to the user, "Higher!", "Lower!" and "Correct!"

3

As the user guesses, the range of numbers they can guess gets smaller - this sentence changes to make sure they know the number range of a valid guess.

4

This input field is bound to a bean property using a value expression.

5

A validator binding is used to make sure the user doesn’t accidentally input a number outside of the range in which they can guess - if the validator wasn’t here, the user might use up a guess on an out of bounds number.

6

And, of course, there must be a way for the user to send their guess to the server. Here we bind to an action method on the bean.

The example consists of 4 classes, the first two of which are qualifiers. First, there is the @Random qualifier, used for injecting a random number:

@Qualifier

@Target( { TYPE, METHOD, PARAMETER, FIELD })
@Retention(RUNTIME)
public @interface Random {}

There is also the @MaxNumber qualifier, used for injecting the maximum number that can be injected:

@Qualifier

@Target( { TYPE, METHOD, PARAMETER, FIELD })
@Retention(RUNTIME)
public @interface MaxNumber {}

The application-scoped Generator class is responsible for creating the random number, via a producer method. It also exposes the maximum possible number via a producer method:

@ApplicationScoped

public class Generator implements Serializable {
    private java.util.Random random = new java.util.Random(System.currentTimeMillis());
    private static final int MAX_NUMBER = 100;
    java.util.Random getRandom() {
        return random;
    }
    @Produces
    @Random
    int next() {
        //a number between 1 and 100
        return getRandom().nextInt(MAX_NUMBER - 1) + 1;
    }
    @Produces
    @MaxNumber
    int getMaxNumber() {
        return MAX_NUMBER;
    }
}

The Generator is application scoped, so we don’t get a different random each time.

The final bean in the application is the session-scoped Game class. This is the primary entry point of the application. It’s responsible for setting up or resetting the game, capturing and validating the user’s guess and providing feedback to the user with a FacesMessage. We’ve used the post-construct lifecycle method to initialize the game by retrieving a random number from the @Random Instance<Integer> bean.

You’ll notice that we’ve also added the @Named annotation to this class. This annotation is only required when you want to make the bean accessible to a JSF view via EL (i.e., #{game}).

import javax.enterprise.inject.Instance;


@Named
@SessionScoped
public class Game implements Serializable {
    private static final int DEFAULT_REMAINING_GUESSES = 10;
    private int number;
    private int guess;
    private int smallest;
    private int biggest;
    private int remainingGuesses;
    @Inject
    @MaxNumber
    private int maxNumber;
    @Inject
    @Random
    private Instance<Integer> randomNumber;
    public Game() {
    }
    public int getNumber() {
        return number;
    }
    public int getGuess() {
        return guess;
    }
    public void setGuess(int guess) {
        this.guess = guess;
    }
    public int getSmallest() {
        return smallest;
    }
    public int getBiggest() {
        return biggest;
    }
    public int getRemainingGuesses() {
        return remainingGuesses;
    }
    public void check() {
        if (guess > number) {
            biggest = guess - 1;
        } else if (guess < number) {
            smallest = guess + 1;
        } else if (guess == number) {
            FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().addMessage(null, new FacesMessage("Correct!"));
        }
        remainingGuesses--;
    }
    @PostConstruct
    public void reset() {
        this.smallest = 0;
        this.guess = 0;
        this.remainingGuesses = DEFAULT_REMAINING_GUESSES;
        this.biggest = maxNumber;
        this.number = randomNumber.get();
    }
    public void validateNumberRange(FacesContext context, UIComponent toValidate, Object value) {
        if (remainingGuesses <= 0) {
            FacesMessage message = new FacesMessage("No guesses left!");
            context.addMessage(toValidate.getClientId(context), message);
            ((UIInput) toValidate).setValid(false);
            return;
        }
        int input = (Integer) value;
        if (input < smallest || input > biggest) {
            ((UIInput) toValidate).setValid(false);
            FacesMessage message = new FacesMessage("Invalid guess");
            context.addMessage(toValidate.getClientId(context), message);
        }
    }
    public boolean isGuessHigher() {
        return guess != 0 && guess > number;
    }
    public boolean isGuessLower() {
        return guess != 0 && guess < number;
    }
    public boolean isGuessCorrect() {
        return guess == number;
    }
}

This example shows how to use the Weld SE extension in a Java SE based Swing application with no EJB or servlet dependencies. This example can be found in the examples/se/numberguess folder of the Weld distribution.

To use the Weld SE numberguess example in Eclipse, you can either import it as a Maven project if you have the m2eclipse plugin installed, or generate an Eclipse project and import it.

With m2eclipse installed, you can open any Maven project directly. From within Eclipse, select File -> Import… -> Existing Maven Projects. Then, browse to the location of the Weld SE numberguess example. You should see that Eclipse recognizes the Maven project.

Without m2eclipse plugin, you first have to generate an Eclipse project. Switch into the Weld SE numberguess example folder, then execute the Maven Eclipse plugin, as follows:

mvn eclipse:configure-workspace -Declipse.workspace=/path/to/your/eclipse/workspace

and then

mvn eclipse:eclipse

Then from within Eclipse, select File -> Import… -> Existing Projects into Workspace and browse to the location of the Weld SE numberguess example.

In both cases, you should now see a project in your workspace called weld-se-numberguess.

It’s time to get the example running!

Let’s have a look at the significant code and configuration files that make up this example.

There is an empty beans.xml file in the root package (src/main/resources/META-INF/beans.xml), which marks this application as a CDI application.

The game’s main logic is located in Game.java. Here is the code for that class, highlighting the ways in which this differs from the web application version:

@ApplicationScoped 1

public class Game { 
2
    public static final int MAX_NUM_GUESSES = 10;
    private Integer number;
    private int guess = 0;
    private int smallest = 0;
    @Inject
    @MaxNumber
    private int maxNumber;
    private int biggest;
    private int remainingGuesses = MAX_NUM_GUESSES;
    private boolean validNumberRange = true;
    @Inject
    Generator rndGenerator;
    public Game() {
    }
    public int getNumber() {
        return number;
    }
    public int getGuess() {
        return guess;
    }
    public void setGuess(int guess) {
        this.guess = guess;
    }
    public int getSmallest() {
        return smallest;
    }
    public int getBiggest() {
        return biggest;
    }
    public int getRemainingGuesses() {
        return remainingGuesses;
    }
    public boolean isValidNumberRange() { 
3
        return validNumberRange;
    }
    public boolean isGameWon() {
        return guess == number;
    }
    public boolean isGameLost() {
        return guess != number && remainingGuesses <= 0;
    }
    public boolean check() { 
4
        boolean result = false;
        if (checkNewNumberRangeIsValid()) {
            if (guess > number) {
                biggest = guess - 1;
            }
            if (guess < number) {
                smallest = guess + 1;
            }
            if (guess == number) {
                result = true;
            }
            remainingGuesses--;
        }
        return result;
    }
    private boolean checkNewNumberRangeIsValid() {
        return validNumberRange = ((guess >= smallest) && (guess <= biggest));
    }
    @PostConstruct
    public void reset() { 
5
        this.smallest = 0;
        this.guess = 0;
        this.remainingGuesses = 10;
        this.biggest = maxNumber;
        this.number = rndGenerator.next();
        System.out.println("psst! the number is " + this.number);
    }
}

1

The bean is application scoped rather than session scoped, since an instance of a Swing application typically represents a single session.

2

Notice that the bean is not named, since it doesn’t need to be accessed via EL.

3

In Java SE there is no JSF FacesContext to which messages can be added. Instead the Game class provides additional information about the state of the current game including:

  • If the game has been won or lost
  • If the most recent guess was invalid

    This allows the Swing UI to query the state of the game, which it does indirectly via a class called MessageGenerator, in order to determine the appropriate messages to display to the user during the game.

4

Since there is no dedicated validation phase, validation of user input is performed during the check() method.

5

The reset() method makes a call to the injected rndGenerator in order to get the random number at the start of each game. Note that it can’t use Instance.get() like the JSF example does because there will not be any active contexts like there are during a JSF request.

The MessageGenerator class depends on the current instance of Game and queries its state in order to determine the appropriate messages to provide as the prompt for the user’s next guess and the response to the previous guess. The code for MessageGenerator is as follows:

public class MessageGenerator {

    @Inject 
1
    private Game game;
    public String getChallengeMessage() { 
2
        StringBuilder challengeMsg = new StringBuilder("I'm thinking of a number between ");
        challengeMsg.append(game.getSmallest());
        challengeMsg.append(" and ");
        challengeMsg.append(game.getBiggest());
        challengeMsg.append(". Can you guess what it is?");
        return challengeMsg.toString();
    }
    public String getResultMessage() { 
3
        if (game.isGameWon()) {
            return "You guessed it! The number was " + game.getNumber();
        } else if (game.isGameLost()) {
            return "You are fail! The number was " + game.getNumber();
        } else if (!game.isValidNumberRange()) {
            return "Invalid number range!";
        } else if (game.getRemainingGuesses() == Game.MAX_NUM_GUESSES) {
            return "What is your first guess?";
        } else {
            String direction = null;
            if (game.getGuess() < game.getNumber()) {
                direction = "Higher";
            } else {
                direction = "Lower";
            }
            return direction + "! You have " + game.getRemainingGuesses() + " guesses left.";
        }
    }
}

1

The instance of Game for the application is injected here.

2

The Game's state is interrogated to determine the appropriate challenge message …

3

… and again to determine whether to congratulate, console or encourage the user to continue.

Finally we come to the NumberGuessFrame class which provides the Swing front end to our guessing game.

import javax.enterprise.event.Observes;


public class NumberGuessFrame extends javax.swing.JFrame {
    @Inject
    private Game game; 
1
    @Inject
    private MessageGenerator msgGenerator; 
2
    public void start(@Observes ContainerInitialized event) { 
3
        java.awt.EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
            public void run() {
                initComponents();
                setVisible(true);
            }
        });
    }
    private void initComponents() { 
4
        borderPanel = new javax.swing.JPanel();
        gamePanel = new javax.swing.JPanel();
        inputsPanel = new javax.swing.JPanel();
        buttonPanel = new javax.swing.JPanel();
        guessButton = new javax.swing.JButton();
        ...
        mainLabel.setText(msgGenerator.getChallengeMessage());
        mainMsgPanel.add(mainLabel);
        messageLabel.setText(msgGenerator.getResultMessage());
        mainMsgPanel.add(messageLabel);
        ...
    }
    private void guessButtonActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) { 
5
        int guess = -1;
        try {
            guess = Integer.parseInt(guessText.getText());
        } catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
            // noop
        }
        game.setGuess(guess);
        game.check();
        refreshUI();
        if (game.isGameWon() || game.isGameLost()) {
            switchButtons();
        }
    }
    private void replayBtnActionPerformed(java.awt.event.ActionEvent evt) { 
6
        game.reset();
        refreshUI();
        switchButtons();
    }
    private void switchButtons() {
        CardLayout buttonLyt = (CardLayout) buttonPanel.getLayout();
        buttonLyt.next(buttonPanel);
    }
    private void refreshUI() {
        mainLabel.setText(msgGenerator.getChallengeMessage());
        messageLabel.setText(msgGenerator.getResultMessage());
        guessText.setText("");
        guessesLeftBar.setValue(game.getRemainingGuesses());
        guessText.requestFocus();
    }
    // swing components
    private javax.swing.JPanel borderPanel;
    ...
    private javax.swing.JButton replayBtn;
}

1

The injected instance of the game (logic and state).

2

The injected message generator for UI messages.

3

This application is started in the prescribed Weld SE way, by observing the ContainerInitialized event.

4

This method initializes all of the Swing components. Note the use of the msgGenerator here.

5

guessButtonActionPerformed is called when the Guess button is clicked, and it does the following:

  • Gets the guess entered by the user and sets it as the current guess in the Game
  • Calls game.check() to validate and perform one turn of the game
  • Calls refreshUI. If there were validation errors with the input, this will have been captured during game.check() and as such will be reflected in the messages returned by MessageGenerator and subsequently presented to the user. If there are no validation errors then the user will be told to guess again (higher or lower) or that the game has ended either in a win (correct guess) or a loss (ran out of guesses).
  • Sets the button’s label based on the game state.

6

replayBtnActionPerformed simply calls game.reset() to start a new game, refreshes the messages in the UI and sets the button’s label based on the game state.

The translator example will take any sentences you enter, and translate them to Latin. (Well, not really, but the stub is there for you to implement, at least. Good luck!)

The translator example is built as an EAR and contains EJBs. As a result, it’s structure is more complex than the numberguess example.

First, let’s take a look at the EAR aggregator project, which is located in the example’s ear directory. Maven automatically generates the application.xml for us from this plugin configuration:


<plugin>
   <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
   <artifactId>maven-ear-plugin</artifactId>
   <configuration>
      <modules>
         <webModule>
            <groupId>org.jboss.weld.examples.jsf.translator</groupId>
            <artifactId>weld-jsf-translator-war</artifactId>
            <contextRoot>/weld-translator</contextRoot>
         </webModule>
      </modules>
   </configuration>
</plugin>

This configuration overrides the web context path, resulting in this application URL: http://localhost:8080/weld-translator.

Note

If you weren’t using Maven to generate these files, you would need META-INF/application.xml:


<application version="7"
   xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/application_7.xsd">

  <display-name>weld-jsf-translator-ear</display-name>
  <description>The Weld JSF translator example (ear)</description>

  <module>
    <web>
      <web-uri>weld-translator.war</web-uri>
      <context-root>/weld-translator</context-root>
    </web>
  </module>
  <module>
    <ejb>weld-translator.jar</ejb>
  </module>
</application>

Next, let’s look at the WAR, which is located in the example’s war directory. Just as in the numberguess example, we have a faces-config.xml for JSF 2.2 and a web.xml (to activate JSF) under WEB-INF, both sourced from src/main/webapp/WEB-INF.

More interesting is the JSF view used to translate text. Just as in the numberguess example we have a template, which surrounds the form (omitted here for brevity):


<h:form id="TranslatorMain">

   <table>
      <tr align="center" style="font-weight: bold">
         <td>
            Your text
         </td>
         <td>
            Translation
         </td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
         <td>
            <h:inputTextarea id="text" value="#{translator.text}" required="true" rows="5" cols="80"/>
         </td>
         <td>
            <h:outputText value="#{translator.translatedText}"/>
         </td>
      </tr>
   </table>
   <div>
      <h:commandButton id="button" value="Translate" action="#{translator.translate}"/>
   </div>

</h:form>

The user can enter some text in the left-hand text area, and hit the translate button to see the result to the right.

Finally, let’s look at the EJB module, which is located in the example’s ejb directory. In src/main/resources/META-INF there is just an empty beans.xml, used to mark the archive as containing beans.

Note

The beans.xml file is no longer required for CDI enablement as of CDI 1.1. CDI is automatically enabled for archives which don’t contain beans.xml but contain one or more bean classes with a bean defining annotation, as described in section Section 15.6.2, “Implicit bean archive”.

We’ve saved the most interesting bit for last, the code! The project has two simple beans, SentenceParser and TextTranslator and two session beans, TranslatorControllerBean and SentenceTranslator. You should be getting quite familiar with what a bean looks like by now, so we’ll just highlight the most interesting bits here.

Both SentenceParser and TextTranslator are dependent beans, and TextTranslator uses constructor injection:

public class TextTranslator implements Serializable {


   private SentenceParser sentenceParser;
   @EJB private Translator translator;
   @Inject public TextTranslator(SentenceParser sentenceParser) {
      this.sentenceParser = sentenceParser;
   }
   public String translate(String text) {
      StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
      for (String sentence: sentenceParser.parse(text)) {
         sb.append(translator.translate(sentence)).append(". ");
      }
      return sb.toString().trim();
   }
}

TextTranslator uses the simple bean (really just a plain Java class!) SentenceParser to parse the sentence and then calls on the stateless bean with the local business interface Translator to perform the translation. That’s where the magic happens. Of course, we couldn’t develop a full translator, but it’s convincing enough to anyone who doesn’t understand Latin!

@Stateless

public class SentenceTranslator implements Translator {
   public String translate(String sentence) {
      return "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet";
   }
}

Finally, there is UI orientated controller. This is a request scoped, named, stateful session bean, which injects the translator. It collects the text from the user and dispatches it to the translator. The bean also has getters and setters for all the fields on the page.

@Stateful

@RequestScoped
@Named("translator")
public class TranslatorControllerBean implements TranslatorController {
   @Inject private TextTranslator translator;
   private String inputText;
   private String translatedText;
   public void translate() {
      translatedText = translator.translate(inputText);
   }
   public String getText() {
      return inputText;
   }
   public void setText(String text) {
      this.inputText = text;
   }
   public String getTranslatedText() {
      return translatedText;
   }
   @Remove public void remove() {}
}

That concludes our short tour of the Weld starter examples. For more information on Weld, please visit http://weld.cdi-spec.org/.

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,

instead of using compound names like

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.

Producer methods let us overcome certain limitations that arise when a container, instead of the application, is responsible for instantiating objects. They’re also the easiest way to integrate objects which are not beans into the CDI environment.

According to the spec:

A producer method acts as a source of objects to be injected, where:

  • the objects to be injected are not required to be instances of beans, or
  • the concrete type of the objects to be injected may vary at runtime, or
  • the objects require some custom initialization that is not performed by the bean constructor.

For example, producer methods let us:

  • expose a JPA entity as a bean,
  • expose any JDK class as a bean,
  • define multiple beans, with different scopes or initialization, for the same implementation class, or
  • vary the implementation of a bean type at runtime.

In particular, producer methods let us use runtime polymorphism with CDI. As we’ve seen, alternative beans are one solution to the problem of deployment-time polymorphism. But once the system is deployed, the CDI implementation is fixed. A producer method has no such limitation:

import javax.enterprise.inject.Produces;


@SessionScoped
public class Preferences implements Serializable {
   private PaymentStrategyType paymentStrategy;
   ...
   @Produces @Preferred
   public PaymentStrategy getPaymentStrategy() {
       switch (paymentStrategy) {
           case CREDIT_CARD: return new CreditCardPaymentStrategy();
           case CHECK: return new CheckPaymentStrategy();
           case PAYPAL: return new PayPalPaymentStrategy();
           default: return null;
       }
   }
}

Consider an injection point:

@Inject @Preferred PaymentStrategy paymentStrategy;

This injection point has the same type and qualifier annotations as the producer method, so it resolves to the producer method using the usual CDI injection rules. The producer method will be called by the container to obtain an instance to service this injection point.

There’s one potential problem with the code above. The implementations of CreditCardPaymentStrategy are instantiated using the Java new operator. Objects instantiated directly by the application can’t take advantage of dependency injection and don’t have interceptors.

If this isn’t what we want, we can use dependency injection into the producer method to obtain bean instances:

@Produces @Preferred @SessionScoped

public PaymentStrategy getPaymentStrategy(CreditCardPaymentStrategy ccps,
                                          CheckPaymentStrategy cps,
                                          PayPalPaymentStrategy ppps) {
   switch (paymentStrategy) {
      case CREDIT_CARD: return ccps;
      case CHEQUE: return cps;
      case PAYPAL: return ppps;
      default: return null;
   }
}

Wait, what if CreditCardPaymentStrategy is a request-scoped bean? Then the producer method has the effect of "promoting" the current request scoped instance into session scope. This is almost certainly a bug! The request scoped object will be destroyed by the container before the session ends, but the reference to the object will be left "hanging" in the session scope. This error will not be detected by the container, so please take extra care when returning bean instances from producer methods!

There are at least two ways we could go to fix this bug. We could change the scope of the CreditCardPaymentStrategy implementation, but this would affect other clients of that bean. A better option would be to change the scope of the producer method to @Dependent or @RequestScoped.

Interceptor functionality is defined in the Java Interceptors specification.

The Interceptors specification defines three kinds of interception points:

  • business method interception,
  • lifecycle callback interception, and
  • timeout method interception (EJB only).

A business method interceptor applies to invocations of methods of the bean by clients of the bean:

public class TransactionInterceptor {

   @AroundInvoke
   public Object manageTransaction(InvocationContext ctx) throws Exception { ... }
}

A lifecycle callback interceptor applies to invocations of lifecycle callbacks by the container:

public class DependencyInjectionInterceptor {

   @PostConstruct
   public void injectDependencies(InvocationContext ctx) { ... }
}

An interceptor class may intercept both lifecycle callbacks and business methods.

A timeout method interceptor applies to invocations of EJB timeout methods by the container:

public class TimeoutInterceptor {

   @AroundTimeout
   public Object manageTransaction(InvocationContext ctx) throws Exception { ... }
}

By default, all interceptors are disabled. We need to enable our interceptor. We can do it using beans.xml descriptor of a bean archive. However, this activation only applies to the beans in that archive. From CDI 1.1 onwards the interceptor can be enabled for the whole application using @Priority annotation.


<beans
   xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_1.xsd">
   <interceptors>
      <class>org.mycompany.myapp.TransactionInterceptor</class>
   </interceptors>
</beans>

Whoah! Why the angle bracket stew?

Well, having the XML declaration is actually a good thing. It solves two problems:

Having two interceptors without @Priority, we could specify that our security interceptor runs before our transaction interceptor.


<beans
   xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_1.xsd">
   <interceptors>
      <class>org.mycompany.myapp.SecurityInterceptor</class>
      <class>org.mycompany.myapp.TransactionInterceptor</class>
   </interceptors>
</beans>

Or we could turn them both off in our test environment by simply not mentioning them in beans.xml! Ah, so simple.

It gets quite tricky when used along with interceptors annotated with @Priority. Interceptors enabled using @Priority are called before interceptors enabled using beans.xml, the lower priority values are called first.

For even more control over interceptors, Weld offers enhanced version of javax.interceptor.InvocationContext - org.jboss.weld.interceptor.WeldInvocationContext. It comes with two additional methods - getInterceptorBindings and getInterceptorBindingsByType(Class<T> annotationType). You shouldn’t need this in most cases, but it comes handy when working with @Nonbinding values in interceptor binding annotations.

Assume you have the following interceptor binding:

@InterceptorBinding

@Inherited
@Target({ TYPE, METHOD, CONSTRUCTOR})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
public @interface FooBinding {
    @Nonbinding
    String secret() default "";
}

Then, in the interceptor class, you can retrieve the secret String in the following way:

@Priority(value = Interceptor.Priority.APPLICATION)

@Interceptor
@FooBinding(secret = "nonbinding")
public class AroundConstructInterceptor {
    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    @AroundConstruct
    void intercept(InvocationContext ctx) throws Exception {
        if(ctx instanceof WeldInvocationContext) {
            Set<Annotation> bindings =  ((WeldInvocationContext)ctx).getInterceptorBindings();
        for (Annotation annotation : bindings) {
                if (annotation.annotationType().equals(FooBinding.class)) {
                    FooBinding fooBinding = (FooBinding) annotation;
                    String secret = fooBinding.secret();
                }
            }
        }
        ctx.proceed();
    }
}

WeldInvocationContext can be used with the following interceptor types:

Alternatively, you can gain access to these binding directly from InvocationContext as we store them there using a key org.jboss.weld.interceptor.bindings. This key is easily accessible from WeldInvocationContext.INTERCEPTOR_BINDINGS_KEY. Let’s alter the previous example to demonstrate this:

@Priority(value = Interceptor.Priority.APPLICATION)

@Interceptor
@FooBinding(secret = "nonbinding")
public class AroundConstructInterceptor {
    @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
    @AroundConstruct
    void intercept(InvocationContext ctx) throws Exception {
        // retrieve data directly from InvocationContext
        Set<Annotation> bindings = (Set<Annotation>) ctx.getContextData().get(WeldInvocationContext.INTERCEPTOR_BINDINGS_KEY);
    if (bindings != null) {
            for (Annotation annotation : bindings) {
                if (annotation.annotationType().equals(FooBinding.class)) {
                    FooBinding fooBinding = (FooBinding) annotation;
                    String secret = fooBinding.secret();
                }
            }
        }
        ctx.proceed();
    }
}

Interceptors are a powerful way to capture and separate concerns which are orthogonal to the application (and type system). Any interceptor is able to intercept invocations of any Java type. This makes them perfect for solving technical concerns such as transaction management, security and call logging. However, by nature, interceptors are unaware of the actual semantics of the events they intercept. Thus, interceptors aren’t an appropriate tool for separating business-related concerns.

The reverse is true of decorators. A decorator intercepts invocations only for a certain Java interface, and is therefore aware of all the semantics attached to that interface. Since decorators directly implement operations with business semantics, it makes them the perfect tool for modeling some kinds of business concerns. It also means that a decorator doesn’t have the generality of an interceptor. Decorators aren’t able to solve technical concerns that cut across many disparate types. Interceptors and decorators, though similar in many ways, are complementary. Let’s look at some cases where decorators fit the bill.

Suppose we have an interface that represents accounts:

public interface Account {

   public BigDecimal getBalance();
   public User getOwner();
   public void withdraw(BigDecimal amount);
   public void deposit(BigDecimal amount);
}

Several different beans in our system implement the Account interface. However, we have a common legal requirement that; for any kind of account, large transactions must be recorded by the system in a special log. This is a perfect job for a decorator.

A decorator is a bean (possibly even an abstract class) that implements the type it decorates and is annotated @Decorator.

@Decorator

public abstract class LargeTransactionDecorator
      implements Account {
   ...
}

The decorator implements the methods of the decorated type that it wants to intercept.

@Decorator

public abstract class LargeTransactionDecorator
      implements Account {
   @Inject @Delegate @Any Account account;
   @PersistenceContext EntityManager em;
   public void withdraw(BigDecimal amount) {
      ...
   }
   public void deposit(BigDecimal amount);
      ...
   }
}

Unlike other beans, a decorator may be an abstract class. Therefore, if there’s nothing special the decorator needs to do for a particular method of the decorated interface, you don’t need to implement that method.

Interceptors for a method are called before decorators that apply to the method.

Decorators have a special injection point, called the delegate injection point, with the same type as the beans they decorate, and the annotation @Delegate. There must be exactly one delegate injection point, which can be a constructor parameter, initializer method parameter or injected field.

@Decorator

public abstract class LargeTransactionDecorator
      implements Account {
   @Inject @Delegate @Any Account account;
   ...
}

A decorator is bound to any bean which:

This delegate injection point specifies that the decorator is bound to all beans that implement Account:

@Inject @Delegate @Any Account account;

A delegate injection point may specify any number of qualifier annotations. The decorator will only be bound to beans with the same qualifiers.

@Inject @Delegate @Foreign Account account;

The decorator may invoke the delegate object, which has much the same effect as calling InvocationContext.proceed() from an interceptor. The main difference is that the decorator can invoke any business method on the delegate object.

@Decorator

public abstract class LargeTransactionDecorator
      implements Account {
   @Inject @Delegate @Any Account account;
   @PersistenceContext EntityManager em;
   public void withdraw(BigDecimal amount) {
      account.withdraw(amount);
      if ( amount.compareTo(LARGE_AMOUNT)>0 ) {
         em.persist( new LoggedWithdrawl(amount) );
      }
   }
   public void deposit(BigDecimal amount);
      account.deposit(amount);
      if ( amount.compareTo(LARGE_AMOUNT)>0 ) {
         em.persist( new LoggedDeposit(amount) );
      }
   }
}

Dependency injection enables loose-coupling by allowing the implementation of the injected bean type to vary, either at deployment time or runtime. Events go one step further, allowing beans to interact with no compile time dependency at all. Event producers raise events that are delivered to event observers by the container.

This basic schema might sound like the familiar observer/observable pattern, but there are a couple of twists:

  • not only are event producers decoupled from observers; observers are completely decoupled from producers,
  • observers can specify a combination of "selectors" to narrow the set of event notifications they will receive, and
  • observers can be notified immediately, or can specify that delivery of the event should be delayed until the end of the current transaction.

The CDI event notification facility uses more or less the same typesafe approach that we’ve already seen with the dependency injection service.

Event producers fire events either synchronously or asynchronously using an instance of the parameterized Event interface. An instance of this interface is obtained by injection:

@Inject @Any Event<Document> documentEvent;

A producer raises asynchronous events by calling the fireAsync() method of the Event interface, passing the event object:

documentEvent.fireAsync(document);

This particular event will only be delivered to asynchronous observer method that:

fireAsync method returns immediately and all the resolved asynchronous observers are notified in one or more different threads. If any observer method throws an exception, the container will suppress it and notify remaining observers. The resulting CompletionStage will then finish exceptionally with CompletionException containing all previously suppressed exceptions.

The Event.fireAsync() method may be called with a NotificationOptions parameter to configure the notification of asynchronous observer methods , e.g. to specify an Executor object to be used for asynchronous delivery. Weld defines the following non-portable notification options (see WeldNotificationOptions):

KeyValue typeDescription

weld.async.notification.mode

String

The notification mode. Possible values are: SERIAL (default), PARALLEL. See also Notification modes.

weld.async.notification.timeout

Long or String which can be parsed as a long

The notification timeout (in milliseconds) after which the returned completion stage must be completed. If the time expires the stage is completed exceptionally with a CompletionException holding the java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException as its cause. The expiration does not abort the notification of the observers.

Table 11.1. Notification modes

ModeDescription

SERIAL

Asynchronous observers are notified serially in a single worker thread (default behavior).

PARALLEL

Asynchronous observers are notified in parallel assuming that the java.util.concurrent.Executor used supports parallel execution.


Transactional observers receive their event notifications during the before or after completion phase of the transaction in which the event was raised. For example, the following observer method needs to refresh a query result set that is cached in the application context, but only when transactions that update the Category tree succeed:

public void refreshCategoryTree(@Observes(during = AFTER_SUCCESS) CategoryUpdateEvent event) { ... }

There are five kinds of transactional observers:

Transactional observers are very important in a stateful object model because state is often held for longer than a single atomic transaction.

Imagine that we have cached a JPA query result set in the application scope:

import javax.ejb.Singleton;

import javax.enterprise.inject.Produces;
@ApplicationScoped @Singleton
public class Catalog {
   @PersistenceContext EntityManager em;
   List<Product> products;
   @Produces @Catalog
   List<Product> getCatalog() {
      if (products==null) {
         products = em.createQuery("select p from Product p where p.deleted = false")
            .getResultList();
      }
      return products;
   }
}

From time to time, a Product is created or deleted. When this occurs, we need to refresh the Product catalog. But we should wait until after the transaction completes successfully before performing this refresh!

The bean that creates and deletes `Product`s could raise events, for example:

import javax.enterprise.event.Event;


@Stateless
public class ProductManager {
   @PersistenceContext EntityManager em;
   @Inject @Any Event<Product> productEvent;
   public void delete(Product product) {
      em.delete(product);
      productEvent.select(new AnnotationLiteral<Deleted>(){}).fire(product);
   }
   public void persist(Product product) {
      em.persist(product);
      productEvent.select(new AnnotationLiteral<Created>(){}).fire(product);
   }
   ...
}

And now Catalog can observe the events after successful completion of the transaction:

import javax.ejb.Singleton;


@ApplicationScoped @Singleton
public class Catalog {
   ...
   void addProduct(@Observes(during = AFTER_SUCCESS) @Created Product product) {
      products.add(product);
   }
   void removeProduct(@Observes(during = AFTER_SUCCESS) @Deleted Product product) {
      products.remove(product);
   }
}

The CDI specification defines a stereotype as follows:

In many systems, use of architectural patterns produces a set of recurring bean roles. A stereotype allows a framework developer to identify such a role and declare some common metadata for beans with that role in a central place.

A stereotype encapsulates any combination of:

  • a default scope, and
  • a set of interceptor bindings.

A stereotype may also specify that:

  • all beans with the stereotype have defaulted bean names, or that
  • all beans with the stereotype are alternatives.

A bean may declare zero, one or multiple stereotypes. Stereotype annotations may be applied to a bean class or producer method or field.

A stereotype is an annotation, annotated @Stereotype, that packages several other annotations. For instance, the following stereotype identifies action classes in some MVC framework:

@Stereotype

@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Target(TYPE)
...
public @interface Action {}

We use the stereotype by applying the annotation to a bean.

@Action

public class LoginAction { ... }

Of course, we need to apply some other annotations to our stereotype or else it wouldn’t be adding much value.

When you first start developing with CDI, you’ll likely be dealing only with a single bean implementation for each bean type. In this case, it’s easy to understand how beans get selected for injection. As the complexity of your application grows, multiple occurrences of the same bean type start appearing, either because you have multiple implementations or two beans share a common (Java) inheritance. That’s when you have to begin studying the specialization, inheritance and alternative rules to work through unsatisfied or ambiguous dependencies or to avoid certain beans from being called.

The CDI specification recognizes two distinct scenarios in which one bean extends another:

  • The second bean specializes the first bean in certain deployment scenarios. In these deployments, the second bean completely replaces the first, fulfilling the same role in the system.
  • The second bean is simply reusing the Java implementation, and otherwise bears no relation to the first bean. The first bean may not even have been designed for use as a contextual object.

The second case is the default assumed by CDI. It’s possible to have two beans in the system with the same part bean type (interface or parent class). As you’ve learned, you select between the two implementations using qualifiers.

The first case is the exception, and also requires more care. In any given deployment, only one bean can fulfill a given role at a time. That means one bean needs to be enabled and the other disabled. There are a two modifiers involved: @Alternative and @Specializes. We’ll start by looking at alternatives and then show the guarantees that specialization adds.

CDI lets you override the implementation of a bean type at deployment time using an alternative. For example, the following bean provides a default implementation of the PaymentProcessor interface:

public class DefaultPaymentProcessor

      implements PaymentProcessor {
   ...
}

But in our staging environment, we don’t really want to submit payments to the external system, so we override that implementation of PaymentProcessor with a different bean:

public @Alternative

class StagingPaymentProcessor
      implements PaymentProcessor {
   ...
}

or

public @Alternative

class StagingPaymentProcessor
      extends DefaultPaymentProcessor {
   ...
}

We’ve already seen how we can enable this alternative by listing its class in the beans.xml descriptor.

But suppose we have many alternatives in the staging environment. It would be much more convenient to be able to enable them all at once. So let’s make @Staging an @Alternative stereotype and annotate the staging beans with this stereotype instead. You’ll see how this level of indirection pays off. First, we create the stereotype:

@Alternative

@Stereotype
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Target(TYPE)
public @interface Staging {}

Then we replace the @Alternative annotation on our bean with @Staging:

@Staging

public class StagingPaymentProcessor
      implements PaymentProcessor {
   ...
}

Finally, we activate the @Staging stereotype in the beans.xml descriptor:


<beans
   xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
      http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_1.xsd">
   <alternatives>
         <stereotype>org.mycompany.myapp.Staging</stereotype>
   </alternatives>
</beans>

Now, no matter how many staging beans we have, they will all be enabled at once.

Java EE 5 already introduced some limited support for dependency injection, in the form of component environment injection. A component environment resource is a Java EE component, for example a JDBC datasource, JMS queue or topic, JPA persistence context, remote EJB or web service.

Naturally, there is now a slight mismatch with the new style of dependency injection in CDI. Most notably, component environment injection relies on string-based names to qualify ambiguous types, and there is no real consistency as to the nature of the names (sometimes a JNDI name, sometimes a persistence unit name, sometimes an EJB link, sometimes a non-portable "mapped name"). Producer fields turned out to be an elegant adaptor to reduce all this complexity to a common model and get component environment resources to participate in the CDI system just like any other kind of bean.

Fields have a duality in that they can both be the target of Java EE component environment injection and be declared as a CDI producer field. Therefore, they can define a mapping from a string-based name in the component environment, to a combination of type and qualifiers used in the world of typesafe injection. We call a producer field that represents a reference to an object in the Java EE component environment a resource.

The CDI specification uses the term resource to refer, generically, to any of the following kinds of object which might be available in the Java EE component environment:

We declare a resource by annotating a producer field with a component environment injection annotation: @Resource, @EJB, @PersistenceContext, @PersistenceUnit or @WebServiceRef.

@Produces @WebServiceRef(lookup="java:app/service/Catalog")

Catalog catalog;
@Produces @Resource(lookup="java:global/env/jdbc/CustomerDatasource")

@CustomerDatabase Datasource customerDatabase;
@Produces @PersistenceContext(unitName="CustomerDatabase")

@CustomerDatabase EntityManager customerDatabasePersistenceContext;
@Produces @PersistenceUnit(unitName="CustomerDatabase")

@CustomerDatabase EntityManagerFactory customerDatabasePersistenceUnit;
@Produces @EJB(ejbLink="../their.jar#PaymentService")

PaymentService paymentService;

The field may be static (but not final).

A resource declaration really contains two pieces of information:

The third theme of CDI is integration. We’ve already seen how CDI helps integrate EJB and JSF, allowing EJBs to be bound directly to JSF pages. That’s just the beginning. The CDI services are integrated into the very core of the Java EE platform. Even EJB session beans can take advantage of the dependency injection, event bus, and contextual lifecycle management that CDI provides.

CDI is also designed to work in concert with technologies outside of the platform by providing integration points into the Java EE platform via an SPI. This SPI positions CDI as the foundation for a new ecosystem of portable extensions and integration with existing frameworks and technologies. The CDI services will be able to reach a diverse collection of technologies, such as business process management (BPM) engines, existing web frameworks and de facto standard component models. Of course, The Java EE platform will never be able to standardize all the interesting technologies that are used in the world of Java application development, but CDI makes it easier to use the technologies which are not yet part of the platform seamlessly within the Java EE environment.

We’re about to see how to take full advantage of the Java EE platform in an application that uses CDI. We’ll also briefly meet a set of SPIs that are provided to support portable extensions to CDI. You might not ever need to use these SPIs directly, but don’t take them for granted. You will likely be using them indirectly, every time you use a third-party extension, such as DeltaSpike.

CDI is fully integrated into the Java EE environment. Beans have access to Java EE resources and JPA persistence contexts. They may be used in Unified EL expressions in JSF and JSP pages. They may even be injected into other platform components, such as servlets and message-driven Beans, which are not beans themselves.

In the Java EE environment, the container provides the following built-in beans, all with the qualifier @Default:

Note

The FacesContext is not injectable. You can get at it by calling FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(). Alternatively you may define the following producer method:

import javax.enterprise.inject.Produces;


class FacesContextProducer {
   @Produces @RequestScoped FacesContext getFacesContext() {
      return FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
   }
}

Sending messages using JMS can be quite complex, because of the number of different objects you need to deal with. For queues we have Queue, QueueConnectionFactory, QueueConnection, QueueSession and QueueSender. For topics we have Topic, TopicConnectionFactory, TopicConnection, TopicSession and TopicPublisher. Each of these objects has its own lifecycle and threading model that we need to worry about.

You can use producer fields and methods to prepare all of these resources for injection into a bean:

import javax.jms.ConnectionFactory;

import javax.jms.Queue;
public class OrderResources {
   @Resource(name="jms/ConnectionFactory")
   private ConnectionFactory connectionFactory;
   @Resource(name="jms/OrderQueue")
   private Queue orderQueue;
   @Produces @Order
   public Connection createOrderConnection() throws JMSException {
    return connectionFactory.createConnection();
   }
   public void closeOrderConnection(@Disposes @Order Connection connection)
         throws JMSException {
      connection.close();
   }
   @Produces @Order
   public Session createOrderSession(@Order Connection connection)
         throws JMSException {
      return connection.createSession(true, Session.AUTO_ACKNOWLEDGE);
   }
   public void closeOrderSession(@Disposes @Order Session session)
         throws JMSException {
      session.close();
   }
   @Produces @Order
   public MessageProducer createOrderMessageProducer(@Order Session session)
         throws JMSException {
      return session.createProducer(orderQueue);
   }
   public void closeOrderMessageProducer(@Disposes @Order MessageProducer producer)
         throws JMSException {
      producer.close();
   }
}

In this example, we can just inject the prepared MessageProducer, Connection or QueueSession:

@Inject Order order;

@Inject @Order MessageProducer producer;
@Inject @Order Session orderSession;
public void sendMessage() {
   MapMessage msg = orderSession.createMapMessage();
   msg.setLong("orderId", order.getId());
   ...
   producer.send(msg);
}

The lifecycle of the injected JMS objects is completely controlled by the container.

CDI doesn’t define any special deployment archive. You can package CDI beans in JARs, EJB JARs or WARs—any deployment location in the application classpath. However, the archive must be a "bean archive".

Unlike CDI 1.0, the CDI 1.1 specification recognizes two types of bean archives. The type determines the way the container discovers CDI beans in the archive.

CDI is intended to be a foundation for frameworks, extensions and integration with other technologies. Therefore, CDI exposes a set of SPIs for the use of developers of portable extensions to CDI. For example, the following kinds of extensions were envisaged by the designers of CDI:

  • integration with Business Process Management engines,
  • integration with third-party frameworks such as Spring, Seam, GWT or Wicket, and
  • new technology based upon the CDI programming model.

More formally, according to the spec:

A portable extension may integrate with the container by:

  • Providing its own beans, interceptors and decorators to the container
  • Injecting dependencies into its own objects using the dependency injection service
  • Providing a context implementation for a custom scope
  • Augmenting or overriding the annotation-based metadata with metadata from some other source

During the initialization process, the container fires a series of events, including:

Extensions may observe these events:

import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension;


class MyExtension implements Extension {
   void beforeBeanDiscovery(@Observes BeforeBeanDiscovery bbd) {
      Logger.global.debug("beginning the scanning process");
   }
   <T> void processAnnotatedType(@Observes ProcessAnnotatedType<T> pat) {
      Logger.global.debug("scanning type: " + pat.getAnnotatedType().getJavaClass().getName());
   }
   void afterBeanDiscovery(@Observes AfterBeanDiscovery abd) {
      Logger.global.debug("finished the scanning process");
   }
}

In fact, the extension can do a lot more than just observe. The extension is permitted to modify the container’s metamodel and more. Here’s a very simple example:

import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension;


class MyExtension implements Extension {
   <T> void processAnnotatedType(@Observes @WithAnnotations({Ignore.class}) ProcessAnnotatedType<T> pat) {
      /* tell the container to ignore the type if it is annotated @Ignore */
      if ( pat.getAnnotatedType().isAnnotationPresent(Ignore.class) ) pat.veto();
   }
}

Container lifecycle event observer methods may inject a BeanManager:

<T> void processAnnotatedType(@Observes ProcessAnnotatedType<T> pat, BeanManager beanManager) { ... }

An extension observer method is not allowed to inject any other object.

Apart from CDI-defined lifecycle events, Weld also offers enriched observable container lifecycle event - WeldAfterBeanDiscovery. Compared to javax.enterprise.inject.spi.AfterBeanDiscovery, it adds one extra method - addInterceptor(). This method works in the same way as the aforementioned Section 16.2.1, “Configurators”; you get back an InterceptorConfigurator instance, where you can set all the desired data. The interceptor is created automatically, once the methods exits and the configurator instance is not reusable. But if you need to create several interceptors, you can simply request several configurator instances. Here is a code snippet to demonstrate the idea:

public void afterBeanDiscovery(@Observes WeldAfterBeanDiscovery event) {


        // type level interceptor
        event.addInterceptor().intercept(InterceptionType.AROUND_INVOKE, (invocationContext) -> {
            try {
                getAnswerToLifeTheUniverseAndEverything();
                return invocationContext.proceed();
            } catch (Exception e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            return null;
        }).priority(2500).addBinding(MyTypeBinding.MyTypeBindingLiteral.INSTANCE);
}

The sample presents a simple interception use case where you supply java.util.function.Function as the interceptor body method. For more complex cases, you may also choose to use interceptWithMetadata method which accepts java.util.function.BiFunction instead. The second parameter of the BiFunction emulates @Inject @Intercepted Bean<?> allowing access to metadata.

The nerve center for extending CDI is the BeanManager object. The BeanManager interface provides operations useful for portable extensions, e.g. lets us obtain beans, interceptors, decorators, observers and contexts programmatically. Note that some of the methods may not be called before the AfterBeanDiscovery event is fired, e.g. BeanManager.getBeans(). Furthermore, the BeanManager.getReference() and BeanManager.getInjectableReference() methods may not be called before the AfterDeploymentValidation event is fired. See also the javadoc for more details.

As already stated in Section 16.2, “Container lifecycle events”, any container lifecycle event observer method can obtain an injected BeanManager reference:

void afterBeanDiscovery(@Observes AfterBeanDiscovery event, BeanManager beanManager) { ... }

Furthermore, any bean or other Java EE component which supports injection can obtain an instance of BeanManager via injection:

@Inject BeanManager beanManager;

Alternatively, a BeanManager reference may be obtained from CDI via a static method call.

CDI.current().getBeanManager()

Java EE components may obtain an instance of BeanManager from JNDI by looking up the name java:comp/BeanManager. Any operation of BeanManager may be called at any time during the execution of the application.

Let’s study some of the interfaces exposed by the BeanManager.

The first thing that a framework developer is going to look for in the portable extension SPI is a way to inject CDI beans into objects which are not under the control of CDI. The InjectionTarget interface makes this very easy.

import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.CDI;


...
//get the BeanManager
BeanManager beanManager = CDI.current().getBeanManager();
//CDI uses an AnnotatedType object to read the annotations of a class
AnnotatedType<SomeFrameworkComponent> type = beanManager.createAnnotatedType(SomeFrameworkComponent.class);
//The extension uses an InjectionTarget to delegate instantiation, dependency injection
//and lifecycle callbacks to the CDI container
InjectionTarget<SomeFrameworkComponent> it = beanManager.createInjectionTarget(type);
//each instance needs its own CDI CreationalContext
CreationalContext ctx = beanManager.createCreationalContext(null);
//instantiate the framework component and inject its dependencies
SomeFrameworkComponent instance = it.produce(ctx);  //call the constructor
it.inject(instance, ctx);  //call initializer methods and perform field injection
it.postConstruct(instance);  //call the @PostConstruct method
...
//destroy the framework component instance and clean up dependent objects
it.preDestroy(instance);  //call the @PreDestroy method
it.dispose(instance);  //it is now safe to discard the instance
ctx.release();  //clean up dependent objects

Instances of the interface Bean represent beans. There is an instance of Bean registered with the BeanManager object for every bean in the application. There are even Bean objects representing interceptors, decorators and producer methods.

The BeanAttributes interface exposes all the interesting things we discussed in Section 2.1, “The anatomy of a bean”.

public interface BeanAttributes<T> {

   public Set<Type> getTypes();
   public Set<Annotation> getQualifiers();
   public Class<? extends Annotation> getScope();
   public String getName();
   public Set<Class<? extends Annotation>> getStereotypes();
   public boolean isAlternative();
}

The Bean interface extends the BeanAttributes interface and defines everything the container needs to manage instances of a certain bean.

public interface Bean<T> extends Contextual<T>, BeanAttributes<T> {

   public Class<?> getBeanClass();
   public Set<InjectionPoint> getInjectionPoints();
   public boolean isNullable();
}

There’s an easy way to find out what beans exist in the application:

Set<Bean<?>> allBeans = beanManager.getBeans(Object.class, new AnnotationLiteral<Any>() {});

The Bean interface makes it possible for a portable extension to provide support for new kinds of beans, beyond those defined by the CDI specification. For example, we could use the Bean interface to allow objects managed by another framework to be injected into beans.

One of the most interesting things that an extension class can do is process the annotations of a bean class before the container builds its metamodel.

Let’s start with an example of an extension that provides support for the use of @Named at the package level. The package-level name is used to qualify the EL names of all beans defined in that package. The portable extension uses the ProcessAnnotatedType event to configure the AnnotatedType object and override the value() of the @Named annotation.

import java.lang.reflect.Type;

import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension;
import java.lang.annotation.Annotation;
...
public class QualifiedNameExtension implements Extension {
    <X> void processAnnotatedType(@Observes ProcessAnnotatedType<X> event) {
        /* wrap this to override the annotations of the class */
        final AnnotatedType<X> at = event.getAnnotatedType();
        /* Only wrap AnnotatedTypes for classes with @Named packages */
        Package pkg = at.getJavaClass().getPackage();
        if (pkg == null || !pkg.isAnnotationPresent(Named.class) ) {
            return;
        }
        String unqualifiedName = "";
        if (at.isAnnotationPresent(Named.class)) {
            unqualifiedName = at.getAnnotation(Named.class).value();
        }
        if (unqualifiedName.isEmpty()) {
            unqualifiedName = Introspector.decapitalize(at.getJavaClass().getSimpleName());
        }
        final String qualifiedName = pkg.getAnnotation(Named.class).value()
                            + '_' + unqualifiedName;
        event.configureAnnotatedType().remove((a) -> a.annotationType().equals(Named.class)).add(NamedLiteral.of(qualifiedName));
    }
}

Here’s a second example, which adds the @Alternative annotation to any class which implements a certain Service interface.

import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension;

import javax.enterprise.inject.Alternative;
...
class ServiceAlternativeExtension implements Extension {
   <extends Service> void processAnnotatedType(@Observes ProcessAnnotatedType<T> event) {
      event.configureAnnotatedType().add(Alternative.Literal.INSTANCE);
   }
}

The AnnotatedType is not the only thing that can be configured/wrapped by an extension.

Configuring an AnnotatedType is a low-level approach to overriding CDI metadata by adding, removing or replacing annotations. Since version 1.1, CDI provides a higher-level facility for overriding attributes of beans discovered by the CDI container.

public interface BeanAttributes<T> {


   public Set<Type> getTypes();
   public Set<Annotation> getQualifiers();
   public Class<? extends Annotation> getScope();
   public String getName();
   public Set<Class<? extends Annotation>> getStereotypes();
   public boolean isAlternative();
}

The BeanAttributes interface exposes attributes of a bean. The container fires a ProcessBeanAttributes event for each enabled bean, interceptor and decorator before this object is registered. Similarly to the ProcessAnnotatedType, this event allows an extension to modify attributes of a bean or to veto the bean entirely.

public interface ProcessBeanAttributes<T> {


    public Annotated getAnnotated();
    public BeanAttributes<T> getBeanAttributes();
    public BeanAttributesConfigurator<T> configureBeanAttributes();
    public void setBeanAttributes(BeanAttributes<T> beanAttributes);
    public void addDefinitionError(Throwable t);
    public void veto();
}

The BeanManager also provides two utility methods for creating the BeanAttributes object from scratch:

public <T> BeanAttributes<T> createBeanAttributes(AnnotatedType<T> type);


public BeanAttributes<?> createBeanAttributes(AnnotatedMember<?> type);

The InjectionTarget interface exposes operations for producing and disposing an instance of a component, injecting its dependencies and invoking its lifecycle callbacks. A portable extension may wrap the InjectionTarget for any Java EE component that supports injection, allowing it to intercept any of these operations when they are invoked by the container.

Here’s a CDI portable extension that reads values from properties files and configures fields of Java EE components, including servlets, EJBs, managed beans, interceptors and more. In this example, properties for a class such as org.mydomain.blog.Blogger go in a resource named org/mydomain/blog/Blogger.properties, and the name of a property must match the name of the field to be configured. So Blogger.properties could contain:

firstName=Gavin

lastName=King

The portable extension works by wrapping the containers InjectionTarget and setting field values from the inject() method.

import javax.enterprise.event.Observes;

import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Extension;
import javax.enterprise.inject.spi.InjectionPoint;
public class ConfigExtension implements Extension {
    <X> void processInjectionTarget(@Observes ProcessInjectionTarget<X> pit) {
          /* wrap this to intercept the component lifecycle */
         final InjectionTarget<X> it = pit.getInjectionTarget();
        final Map<Field, Object> configuredValues = new HashMap<Field, Object>();
        /* use this to read annotations of the class and its members */
        AnnotatedType<X> at = pit.getAnnotatedType();
        /* read the properties file */
        String propsFileName = at.getJavaClass().getSimpleName() + ".properties";
        InputStream stream = at.getJavaClass().getResourceAsStream(propsFileName);
        if (stream!=null) {
            try {
                Properties props = new Properties();
                props.load(stream);
                for (Map.Entry<Object, Object> property : props.entrySet()) {
                    String fieldName = property.getKey().toString();
                    Object value = property.getValue();
                    try {
                        Field field = at.getJavaClass().getDeclaredField(fieldName);
                        field.setAccessible(true);
                        if ( field.getType().isAssignableFrom( value.getClass() ) ) {
                            configuredValues.put(field, value);
                        }
                        else {
                            /* TODO: do type conversion automatically */
                            pit.addDefinitionError( new InjectionException(
                                   "field is not of type String: " + field ) );
                        }
                    }
                    catch (NoSuchFieldException nsfe) {
                        pit.addDefinitionError(nsfe);
                    }
                    finally {
                        stream.close();
                    }
                }
            }
            catch (IOException ioe) {
                pit.addDefinitionError(ioe);
            }
        }
        InjectionTarget<X> wrapped = new InjectionTarget<X>() {
            @Override
            public void inject(X instance, CreationalContext<X> ctx) {
                it.inject(instance, ctx);
                /* set the values onto the new instance of the component */
                for (Map.Entry<Field, Object> configuredValue: configuredValues.entrySet()) {
                    try {
                        configuredValue.getKey().set(instance, configuredValue.getValue());
                    }
                    catch (Exception e) {
                        throw new InjectionException(e);
                    }
                }
            }
            @Override
            public void postConstruct(X instance) {
                it.postConstruct(instance);
            }
            @Override
            public void preDestroy(X instance) {
                it.dispose(instance);
            }
            @Override
            public void dispose(X instance) {
                it.dispose(instance);
            }
            @Override
            public Set<InjectionPoint> getInjectionPoints() {
                return it.getInjectionPoints();
            }
            @Override
            public X produce(CreationalContext<X> ctx) {
                return it.produce(ctx);
            }
        };
        pit.setInjectionTarget(wrapped);
    }
}

CDI 1.0) (CDI 1.1).

The CDI reference implementation, Weld, is being developed by the Weld team. The team and the CDI spec lead blog at in.relation.to. This guide was originally based on a series of blog entries published there while the specification was being developed. It’s probably the best source of information about the future of CDI and Weld.

We encourage you to follow the weld-dev mailing list and to get involved in development. If you are reading this guide, you likely have something to offer.

Weld is the reference implementation of CDI, and is used by WildFly, GlassFish and WebLogic to provide CDI services for Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications. Weld also goes beyond the environments and APIs defined by the CDI specification by providing support for a number of other environments (such as a servlet container such as Tomcat, or Java SE).

You might also want to check out DeltaSpike project which provides portable extensions to CDI.

If you want to get started quickly using Weld (and, in turn, CDI) with WildFly, GlassFish or Tomcat and experiment with one of the examples, take a look at Chapter 6, Getting started with Weld. Otherwise read on for a exhaustive discussion of using Weld in all the environments and application servers it supports and the Weld extensions.

Table of Contents

18. Application servers and environments supported by Weld
18.1. Using Weld with WildFly
18.2. GlassFish
18.3. Servlet containers (such as Tomcat or Jetty)
18.3.1. Tomcat
18.3.2. Jetty
18.3.3. Undertow
18.3.4. WildFly Web
18.3.5. Bean Archive Isolation
18.3.6. Implicit Bean Archive Support
18.3.7. Servlet Container Detection
18.4. Java SE
18.4.1. CDI SE Module
18.4.2. Bootstrapping CDI SE
18.4.3. Request Context
18.4.4. Thread Context
18.4.5. Setting the Classpath
18.4.6. Bean Archive Isolation
18.4.7. Implicit Bean Archive Support
18.5. Weld SE and Weld Servlet cooperation
18.6. OSGi
19. Configuration
19.1. Weld configuration
19.1.1. Relaxed construction
19.1.2. Concurrent deployment configuration
19.1.3. Thread pool configuration
19.1.4. Non-portable mode during application initialization
19.1.5. Proxying classes with final methods
19.1.6. Bounding the cache size for resolved injection points
19.1.7. Debugging generated bytecode
19.1.8. Injectable reference lookup optimization
19.1.9. Bean identifier index optimization
19.1.10. Rolling upgrades ID delimiter
19.1.11. Development Mode
19.1.12. Conversation timeout and Conversation concurrent access timeout
19.1.13. Veto types without bean defining annotation
19.1.14. Memory consumption optimization - removing unused beans
19.2. Defining external configuration
19.3. Excluding classes from scanning and deployment
19.4. Mapping CDI contexts to HTTP requests
20. Logging
20.1. Java EE containers
20.2. Servlet containers
20.3. Weld SE
21. Development Mode
21.1. How to enable the development mode
21.1.1. Web application
21.1.2. Weld SE
21.1.3. Is The Development Mode Enabled?
21.2. Development Tools
21.2.1. Probe
21.2.2. Validation Report
22. Context Management
22.1. Managing the built in contexts
A. Integrating Weld into other environments
A.1. The Weld SPI
A.1.1. Deployment structure
A.1.2. EJB descriptors
A.1.3. EE resource injection and resolution services
A.1.4. EJB services
A.1.5. JPA services
A.1.6. Transaction Services
A.1.7. Resource Services
A.1.8. Web Service Injection Services
A.1.9. Injection Services
A.1.10. Security Services
A.1.11. Initialization and shutdown
A.1.12. Resource loading
A.1.13. ClassFileServices
A.1.14. Registering services
A.2. The contract with the container
A.2.1. Classloader isolation
A.2.2. Servlet
A.2.3. CDI Conversation Filter
A.2.4. JSF
A.2.5. JSP
A.2.6. Session Bean Interceptor
A.2.7. The weld-core.jar
A.2.8. Binding the manager in JNDI
A.2.9. CDIProvider
A.2.10. Performing CDI injection on Java EE component classes
A.2.11. Around-construct interception
A.2.12. Probe Development Tool (Optional)
A.2.13. Optimized cleanup after bootstrap
A.3. Migration notes
A.3.1. Migration from Weld 1.x to 2.0
A.3.2. Migration from Weld 2.0 to 2.1
A.3.3. Migration from Weld 2.1 to 2.2
A.3.4. Migration from Weld 2.2 to 2.3
A.3.5. Migration from Weld 2.3 to 2.4
A.3.6. Migration from Weld 2.4 to 3.0

While CDI does not require support for servlet environments, Weld can be used in a servlet container, such as Tomcat or Jetty.

Weld can be used as a library in an web application that is deployed to a Servlet container. You should add the weld-servlet-core as a dependency to your project:


<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jboss.weld.servlet</groupId>
    <artifactId>weld-servlet-core</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.5.Final</version>
</dependency>

All the necessary dependencies (CDI API, Weld core) will be fetched transitively.

Alternatively, there is a shaded version with all the dependencies in a single jar file which is available as:


<dependency>
    <groupId>org.jboss.weld.servlet</groupId>
    <artifactId>weld-servlet-shaded</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.5.Final</version>
</dependency>

In general, weld-servlet uses ServletContainerInitializer mechanism to hook into the life cycle of Servlet 3.x compatible containers.

In special cases when your Servlet container does not support ServletContainerInitializer or you need more control over the ordering of listeners (e.g. move Weld’s listener) to the beginning of the list so that CDI context are active during invocation of other listeners) you can register Weld’s listener manually in the WEB-INF/web.xml file of the application:


<listener>
   <listener-class>org.jboss.weld.environment.servlet.Listener</listener-class>
</listener>

Note

There is quite a special use-case where one more special component must be involved. If you want the session context to be active during HttpSessionListener.sessionDestroyed() invocation when the session times out or when all the sessions are destroyed because the deployment is being removed then org.jboss.weld.module.web.servlet.WeldTerminalListener must be specified as the last one in your web.xml. This listener activates the session context before other listeners are invoked (note that the listeners are notified in reverse order when a session is being destroyed).

When working with multiple deployments in servlet environment, Weld Servlet allows to define context identifier per application deployed. Each different context identifier will create a new Weld container instance. If not specified, Weld falls back to the default value - STATIC_INSTANCE. While using custom identifiers is neither required nor commonly used, it certainly has some use-cases. For instance managing several deployments with Arquillian Tomcat container. Setting the identifier is as simple as adding one context parameter into web.xml:


<context-param>
   <param-name>WELD_CONTEXT_ID_KEY</param-name>
   <param-value>customValue</param-value>
</context-param>

Tomcat 7 and 8 are supported. Context activation/deactivation and dependency injection into Servlets and Filters works out of the box. Injection into Servlet listeners works on Tomcat 7.0.50 and newer.

Jetty 9.3.6 and newer are supported. Context activation/deactivation and dependency injection into Servlets and Filters works out of the box. Injection into Servlet listeners works on Jetty 9.1.1 and newer.

No further configuration is needed when starting Jetty as an embedded webapp server from within another Java program. However, if you’re using a Jetty standalone instance one more configuration step is required.

The reason is that since Jetty 8 some internal classes are not visible from the web application. See also Setting Server Classes. Therefore, we have to tell Jetty not to hide the system classes which Weld integration code is using. We can use the jetty-web.xml descriptor (see also Jetty XML Reference):


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Jetty//Configure//EN" "http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/configure.dtd">
<Configure class="org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
   <Call name="prependServerClass">
      <Arg>-org.eclipse.jetty.util.Decorator</Arg>
   </Call>
   <Call name="prependServerClass">
      <Arg>-org.eclipse.jetty.util.DecoratedObjectFactory</Arg>
   </Call>
   <Call name="prependServerClass">
      <Arg>-org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandler.</Arg>
   </Call>
   <Call name="prependServerClass">
      <Arg>-org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandler</Arg>
   </Call>
   <Call name="prependServerClass">
      <Arg>-org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletContextHandler</Arg>
   </Call>
</Configure>

Tip

Jetty distributions (from version 9.2.4) contain a dedicated CDI/Weld module which allows to deploy a CDI application without bundling the Weld Servlet integration code.

To bind the BeanManager into JNDI, you should either populate WEB-INF/jetty-env.xml with the following contents:


<!DOCTYPE Configure PUBLIC "-//Mort Bay Consulting//DTD Configure//EN"
   "http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/configure.dtd">

<Configure id="webAppCtx" class="org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
    <New id="BeanManager" class="org.eclipse.jetty.plus.jndi.Resource">
        <Arg> <Ref id="webAppCtx"/> </Arg>
        <Arg>BeanManager</Arg>
        <Arg>
            <New class="javax.naming.Reference">
                <Arg>javax.enterprise.inject.spi.BeanManager</Arg>
                <Arg>org.jboss.weld.resources.ManagerObjectFactory</Arg>
                <Arg/>
            </New>
        </Arg>
    </New>
</Configure>

Or you can configure a special Servlet listener to bind the BeanManager automatically:


<listener>
   <listener-class>org.jboss.weld.environment.servlet.BeanManagerResourceBindingListener</listener-class>
</listener>

Just like in Tomcat, you need to make the BeanManager available to your deployment by adding this to the bottom of web.xml:


<resource-env-ref>
   <resource-env-ref-name>BeanManager</resource-env-ref-name>
   <resource-env-ref-type>
      javax.enterprise.inject.spi.BeanManager
   </resource-env-ref-type>
</resource-env-ref>

Jetty only allows you to bind entries to java:comp/env, so the BeanManager will be available at java:comp/env/BeanManager.

Weld supports context activation/deactivation and dependency injection into Servlets when running on Undertow. Injection into Filters and Servlet listeners is not currently supported. Weld’s listener needs to be registered programmatically:

public class Main {


    public static void main(String[] args) throws ServletException {
        DeploymentInfo servletBuilder = Servlets.deployment()
                .setClassLoader(Main.class.getClassLoader())
                .setResourceManager(new ClassPathResourceManager(Main.class.getClassLoader()))
                .setContextPath("/")
                .setDeploymentName("test.war")
                .addServlet(Servlets.servlet("hello", HelloWorldServlet.class).addMapping("/*"))
                .addListener(Servlets.listener(Listener.class)); 
1
        DeploymentManager manager = Servlets.defaultContainer().addDeployment(servletBuilder);
        manager.deploy();
        HttpHandler servletHandler = manager.start();
        PathHandler path = Handlers.path(Handlers.redirect("/")).addPrefixPath("/", servletHandler);
        Undertow server = Undertow.builder().addHttpListener(8080, "localhost").setHandler(path).build();
        server.start();
    }
    public static class HelloWorldServlet extends HttpServlet {
        @Inject BeanManager manager;
        protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp) throws ServletException, IOException {
            resp.setContentType("text/plain");
            resp.getWriter().append("Hello from " + manager);
        }
    }
}

1

Weld’s org.jboss.weld.environment.servlet.Listener registered programmatically:

CDI 1.1 introduced the bean discovery mode of annotated used for implicit bean archives (see also Section 15.6, “Packaging and deployment”). This mode may bring additional overhead during container bootstrap. Therefore, Weld Servlet supports the use of Jandex bytecode scanning library to speed up the scanning process. Simply put the jandex.jar on the classpath. If Jandex is not found on the classpath Weld will use the Java Reflection as a fallback.

In general, an implicit bean archive does not have to contain a beans.xml descriptor. However, such a bean archive is not supported by Weld Servlet, i.e. it’s excluded from discovery.

Note

The bean discovery mode of annotated is supported from version 2.2.5.Final. Previous versions processed implicit bean archives in the same way as explicit bean archives.

In addition to improved integration of the Enterprise Java stack, the "Contexts and Dependency Injection for the Java EE platform" specification also defines a state of the art typesafe, stateful dependency injection framework, which can prove useful in a wide range of application types. To help developers take advantage of this, Weld provides a simple means for being executed in the Java Standard Edition (SE) environment independently of any Java EE APIs.

When executing in the SE environment the following features of Weld are available:

EJB beans are not supported.

CDI SE applications can be bootstrapped in the following ways.

For added flexibility, CDI SE also comes with a bootstrap API which can be called from within your application in order to initialize CDI and obtain references to your application’s beans and events. The API consists of two classes: Weld and WeldContainer.

/** A builder used to bootsrap a Weld SE container. */

public class Weld extends SeContainerInitializer implements ContainerInstanceFactory
{
   /** Boots Weld and creates and returns a WeldContainer instance, through which
    * beans and events can be accesed. */
   public WeldContainer initialize() {...}
   /** Convenience method for shutting down all the containers initialized by a specific builder instance. */
   public void shutdown() {...}
}
/** Represents a Weld SE container. */

public class WeldContainer extends AbstractCDI<Object> implements AutoCloseable, ContainerInstance, SeContainer
{
   /** Provides access to all events within the application. */
   public Event<Object> event() {...}
   /** Provides direct access to the BeanManager. */
   public BeanManager getBeanManager() {...}
   /** Returns the identifier of the container */
   String getId() {...}
   /** Shuts down the container. */
   public void shutdown() {...}
   /** Returns the running container with the specified identifier or null if no such container exists */
   public static WeldContainer instance(String id) {...}
}

Here’s an example application main method which uses this API to bootsrap a Wedl SE container and call a business method of a bean MyApplicationBean.

import org.jboss.weld.environment.se.Weld;


public static void main(String[] args) {
   Weld weld = new Weld();
   WeldContainer container = weld.initialize();
   container.select(MyApplicationBean.class).get().callBusinessMethod();
   container.shutdown();
}

Alternatively the application could be started by firing a custom event which would then be observed by another simple bean. The following example fires MyEvent on startup.

org.jboss.weld.environment.se.Weld;


public static void main(String[] args) {
   Weld weld = new Weld();
   WeldContainer container = weld.initialize();
   container.event().select(MyEvent.class).fire( new MyEvent() );
   // When all observer methods are notified the container shuts down
   container.shutdown();
}

Because WeldContainer implements AutoCloseable, it can be used within a try-with-resources block. Should the execution get out of the code block, the Weld instance is shut down and all managed instances are safely destroyed. Here is an example using the above code but leaving out the shutdown() method:

org.jboss.weld.environment.se.Weld;


public static void main(String[] args) {
   Weld weld = new Weld();
   try (WeldContainer container = weld.initialize()) {
      container.select(MyApplicationBean.class).get().callBusinessMethod();
   }
}

In case of more complex scenarios, it might be handy to gain higher level of control over the bootstraping process. Using the builder, it is possible to disable automatic scanning and to explicitly select classes/packages which will be managed by Weld. Interceptors, decorators and extensions can be defined in the very same manner. Last but not least, builder can be used to set Weld-specific configuration. Following example demonstrates these features:

Weld weld = new Weld()

    .disableDiscovery()
    .packages(Main.class, Utils.class)
    .interceptors(TransactionalInterceptor.class)
    .property("org.jboss.weld.construction.relaxed", true);
try (WeldContainer container = weld.initialize()) {
    MyBean bean = container.select(MyBean.class).get();
    System.out.println(bean.computeResult());
}

Furthermore, it is also possible to create several independent Weld instances. Code snippet below shows how to achieve that:

Weld weld = new Weld()

    .disableDiscovery();
weld.containerId("one").beanClasses(MyBean.class).initialize();
weld.containerId("two").beanClasses(OtherBean.class).initialize();
MyBean bean = WeldContainer.instance("one").select(MyBean.class).get();
System.out.println(bean.computeResult());
// Shutdown the first container
WeldContainer.instance("one").shutdown();
// Shutdown all the containers initialized by the builder instance
weld.shutdown();

In contrast to Java EE applications, Java SE applications place no restrictions on developers regarding the creation and usage of threads. Therefore Weld SE provides a custom scope annotation, @ThreadScoped, and corresponding context implementation which can be used to bind bean instances to the current thread. It is intended to be used in scenarios where you might otherwise use ThreadLocal, and does in fact use ThreadLocal under the hood.

To use the @ThreadScoped annotation you need to enable the RunnableDecorator which listens for all executions of Runnable.run() and decorates them by setting up the thread context beforehand, bound to the current thread, and destroying the context afterwards.


<beans>
  <decorators>
     <class>org.jboss.weld.environment.se.threading.RunnableDecorator</class>
  </decorator>
</beans>

Another option how to use thread context is to enable it at class or method level by @ActivateThreadScope interceptor binding and related ActivateThreadScopeInterceptor.

public class Foo {


  @Inject
  MyThreadScopedBean bean;
  @ActivateThreadScope
  public void executeInThreadContext() {
    bean.ping()
  }
}

CDI 1.1 introduced the bean discovery mode of annotated used for implicit bean archives (see also Section 15.6, “Packaging and deployment”). This mode may bring additional overhead during container bootstrap. Therefore, Weld Servlet supports the use of Jandex bytecode scanning library to speed up the scanning process. Simply put the jandex.jar on the classpath. If Jandex is not found on the classpath Weld will use the Java Reflection as a fallback.

By default, an implicit bean archive that does not contain a beans.xml descriptor is excluded from discovery. However, it is possible to instruct Weld to scan all class path entries and discover such archive. You can do so by setting Weld system property org.jboss.weld.se.scan.classpath.entries or CDI 2.0 system property javax.enterprise.inject.scan.implicit to true. Another approach is to use Weld.property() and SeContainerInitializer.addProperty() methods.

Note

The bean discovery mode of annotated is supported from version 2.2.0.Final. Previous versions processed implicit bean archives in the same way as explicit bean archives.

Sometimes it could be convenient to start Servlet container programmatically. In this case a cooperation with Weld SE might come handy. This cooperation is based on passing Weld, WeldContainer or BeanManager instance to ServletContextHandler (in case of Jetty). You can either set a context attribute or use org.jboss.weld.environment.servlet.Listener. Check following examples.

Adding WeldContainer instance as a context attribute:

        try (WeldContainer weld = new Weld().disableDiscovery().beanClasses(Cat.class).initialize()) {

              ServletContextHandler context = new ServletContextHandler(ServletContextHandler.SESSIONS);
              context.addEventListener(new Listener());
              context.setAttribute(Listener.CONTAINER_ATTRIBUTE_NAME, weld);
              Server server = new Server(8080);
              context.setContextPath("/");
              server.setHandler(context);
              context.addServlet(TestServlet.class, "/test");
              server.start();
        }

Adding BeanManager instance as a context attribute:

        Weld weld = new Weld();

        WeldContainer container = weld.initialize();
        Server server = new Server(8080);
        context.setContextPath("/");
        server.setHandler(context);
        context.addServlet(TestServlet.class, "/test");
        context.setAttribute(WeldServletLifecycle.BEAN_MANAGER_ATTRIBUTE_NAME, container.getBeanManager());
        server.start();

Adding Weld instance as event listener with usage of org.jboss.weld.environment.servlet.Listener:

        Weld builder = new Weld().disableDiscovery().beanClasses(Cat.class);

        ServletContextHandler context = new ServletContextHandler(ServletContextHandler.SESSIONS);
        context.addEventListener(Listener.using(builder));
        Server server = new Server(8080);
        context.setContextPath("/");
        server.setHandler(context);
        context.addServlet(TestServlet.class, "/test");
        server.start();

Weld can be configured per application through the set of properties. All the supported configuration properties are described in the following subsections.

Each configuration property can be specified (by priority in descending order):

If a configuration key is set in multiple sources (e.g. as a system property and in a properties file), the value from the source with higher priority is taken, other values are ignored. Unsupported configuration keys are ignored. If an invalid configuration property value is set, the container automatically detects the problem and treats it as a deployment problem.

For certain types of tasks Weld uses its own thread pool. The thread pool is represented by the ExecutorServices service.

First of all, let’s see what types of thread pools are available:

Thread pool typeDescription

FIXED

Uses a fixed number of threads. The number of threads remains the same throughout the application.

FIXED_TIMEOUT

Uses a fixed number of threads. A thread will be stopped after a configured period of inactivity.

SINGLE_THREAD

A single-threaded thread pool

NONE

No executor is used by Weld

COMMON

The default ForkJoinPool.commonPool() is used by Weld. See link for more details

Now let’s see how to configure Weld to use a particular thread pool type:


Note

It’s possible to alter the thread pool configuration using the deprecated org.jboss.weld.executor.properties file located on the classpath. The keys are threadPoolType, threadPoolSize, threadPoolKeepAliveTime and threadPoolDebug.

Some features of the development mode may have negative impact on the performance and/or functionality of the application. The following configuration properties allow to tune or disable these features, e.g. to specify the set of components which will be monitored.


Tip

To disable the monitoring entirely set org.jboss.weld.probe.invocationMonitor.excludeType and org.jboss.weld.probe.eventMonitor.excludeType properties to .*.

Sometimes it might be useful to process all types during bootstrap, i.e. fire/observe ProcessAnnotatedType event for each Java class discovered, but veto types which are not annotated with a bean defining annotation. The main reason is that not all classes that meet all of the necessary conditions are intended to become beans. And so vetoing such types helps to conserve memory used by the container. Note that if you use bean-discovey-mode=annotated (implicit bean archive) then no ProcessAnnotatedType will be fired for any such type because it’s not discovered at all. And there might be portable extensions which use ProcessAnnotatedType to extract some important information from classes which are not beans.

Therefore, Weld allows to use bean-discovey-mode=all (explicit bean archive) and veto types without a bean defining annotation whose AnnotatedType#getJavaClass().getName() matches a regular expression. In other words, a type is vetoed if its name matches a regular expression and at the same time is not annotated with a bean defining annotation. The functionality is implemented as a built-in portable extension processing all types from all bean archives.


CDI applications consist of user-defined beans implementing the business logic, but also beans coming from libraries (e.g. DeltaSpike) and integrations (e.g. various Java EE technologies - JSF, Bean Validation, Batch). Most applications actually use only a small part of the beans provided by libraries and integrations. Still, Weld has to retain the metadata for all the beans in memory which can be considerably vast footprint, depending on the application. If Section A.2.13, “Optimized cleanup after bootstrap” is allowed, Weld can remove unused beans after bootstrap.

An unused bean:

  • is not excluded by the configuration properties described below,
  • is not a built-in bean, session bean, extension, interceptor or decorator,
  • does not have a name
  • does not declare an observer
  • is not eligible for injection to any injection point,
  • does not declare a producer which is eligible for injection to any injection point,
  • is not eligible for injection into any Instance<X> injection point.

Tip

If you run Section 21.2.1, “Probe” and list all the beans in your application, you will almost certainly notice some of them coming from 3rd party libraries which you never use (marked with a trash icon). Those are candidates for unused beans as you can be sure you are not using them.

Note

As usual, there is a trade-off between memory consumption and bootstrap time. The results may vary depending on the application, but you should always expect (most probably negligible) increase of the bootstrap time.

The following properties can be used to restrict the set of beans Weld is going to remove, e.g. to eliminate the false positives.


Weld allows integrators to provide an external configuration - a class which implements org.jboss.weld.configuration.spi.ExternalConfiguration interface. This interface has getConfigurationProperties method which returns a Map with provided configuration and also inherits a cleanup method because it extends org.jboss.weld.bootstrap.api.Service. Below is a short example of ExternalConfiguration implementation:

public class MyExternalConfiguration implements ExternalConfiguration {

    @Override
    public void cleanup() {
    // cleanup code
    }
    @Override
    public Map<String, Object> getConfigurationProperties() {
        Map<String, Object> properties = new HashMap<String, Object>();
        properties.put(ConfigurationKey.CONCURRENT_DEPLOYMENT.get(), false);
        properties.put(ConfigurationKey.PRELOADER_THREAD_POOL_SIZE.get(), 200);
        properties.put(ConfigurationKey.PROXY_DUMP.get(), "/home/weld");
        return properties;
    }
}

Bear in mind that because ExternalConfiguration extends a Service it is required that any custom external configuration implementation is explicitly registered. See Section A.1, “The Weld SPI” for more information.

Last but not least external configuration is considered a source with the lowest priority which means that the properties specified there can be overriden by other sources such as system properties. For information on supported configuration keys, see Section 19.1, “Weld configuration”. Also note that entries with unsupported properties will be ignored while invalid property values will lead to deployment problem.

CDI 1.1 allows you to exclude classes in your archive from being scanned, having container lifecycle events fired, and being deployed as beans. See also 12.4.2 Exclude filters.

Note

Weld still supports the original non-portable way of excluding classes from discovery. The formal specification can be found in the xsd, located at http://jboss.org/schema/weld/beans_1_1.xsd. Unlike Weld, the CDI specification does not support regular expression patterns and ! character to invert the activation condition.

All the configuration is done in the beans.xml file. For more information see Section 15.6, “Packaging and deployment”.


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee">

    <scan>

        <!-- Don't deploy the classes for the swing app! -->
        <exclude name="com.acme.swing.**" />

        <!-- Don't include GWT support if GWT is not installed -->
        <exclude name="com.acme.gwt.**">
            <if-class-not-available name="com.google.GWT"/>
        </exclude>

        <!--
            Exclude types from com.acme.verbose package if the system property verbosity is set to low
            i.e.
              java ... -Dverbosity=low
        -->
        <exclude name="com.acme.verbose.*">
            <if-system-property name="verbosity" value="low"/>
        </exclude>

        <!--
             Don't include JSF support if Wicket classes are present, and the viewlayer system
             property is set
        -->
        <exclude name="com.acme.jsf.**">
            <if-class-available name="org.apache.wicket.Wicket"/>
            <if-system-property name="viewlayer"/>
        </exclude>
    </scan>

</beans>

In this example we show the most common use cases for exercising fine control over which classes Weld scans. The first filter excludes all types whose package name starts with com.acme.swing, and in most cases this will be sufficient for your needs.

However, sometimes it’s useful to be able to activate the filter depending on the environment used. In this case, Weld allows you to activate (or deactivate) a filter based on either system properties or whether a class is available. The second filter shows the use case of disabling scanning of certain classes depending on the capabilities of the environment you deploy to - in this case we are excluding GWT support (all types whose package name starts with com.acme.gwt) if GWT is not installed.

Note

If you specify just a system property name, Weld will activate the filter if that system property has been set (with any value). If you also specify the system property value, then Weld will only activate the filter if the system property’s value matches exactly.

The third filter shows how to exclude all types from a specific package (note the name attribute has suffix ".*").

The fourth filter shows more a advanced configurations, where we use multiple activation conditions to decide whether to activate the filter.

You can combine as many activation conditions as you like (all must be true for the filter to be activated). If you want to a filter that is active if any of the activation conditions are true, then you need multiple identical filters, each with different activation conditions.

Weld is using JBoss Logging, an abstraction layer which provides support for the internationalization and localization of log messages and exception messages. However, JBoss Logging itself does not write any log messages. Instead, it only constructs a log message and delegates to one of the supported logging frameworks.

The supported "back-end" frameworks include:

A system property org.jboss.logging.provider may be used to specify the logging framework directly. Supported values are jboss, jdk, log4j and slf4j. If this system property is not set, JBoss Logging will attempt to find the logging frameworks from the above-mentioned list on the classpath - the first one found is taken.

Weld comes with a special mode for application development. When enabled, certain built-in tools which facilitate the development of CDI applications, are available.

Note

The development mode should not be used in production as it may have negative impact on the performance of the application. Make sure to disable the development mode before deploying to production.

Warning

Not all environments and containers may support the development mode and all tools. Check the tools details and the container documentation.