In Relation To

InfoQ is running an interview we did about Web Beans.

I'm pleased to announce the release of the Web Beans RI 1.0.0.ALPHA1. This release implements the core of the JSR-299 Web Beans specification and represents a major milestone on the road towards the GA release. Some of the highlights of this release include simple and enterprise Web Beans, support for JBoss Application Server 5, typesafe injection, events and producer methods. There's an exhaustive list below.

The Web Beans specification defines an XML configuration format that uses XML namespaces to achieve typesafety.

The Web Beans event bus provides a very nice way for stateful components to synchronize their state with changes that take place in the application.

Over the past few weeks, we've had a number of conversations between the major Java EE vendors regarding the inclusion of Web Beans (JSR-299) in the Java EE 6 platform. Several members of the EE 6 expert group have concerns about how the current draft of the specification characterizes the functionality of Web Beans, and about how well the functionality integrates at the platform level. Therefore, as requested by one of the other vendors, we've extended the Public Review period until early February with the goal of taking further input from folks with platform expertise. The expert group will submit a revised Public Review Draft in late January or February that incorporates this feedback.

Devoxx, the show formerly known as JavaPolis is coming up soon and while I was preparing for my talks I started browsing the full program and saw it is going to be great for anyone interested in Hibernate, Seam, JBoss Tools, JBoss AS and other JBoss technologies.

I keep getting asked about the relationship between Seam and Web Beans. At a high level, the mission of the Seam project remains unchanged: to provide a fully integrated development platform for building rich Internet applications, based upon the Java EE environment. In Seam2, this platform consists of the following layers:

Here's another usecase for the injection point metadata API that we're considering adding to Web Beans. I've always thought it would be nice to be able to inject entity instances by role, instead of passing references around the system. (In Seam, you can use home objects to achieve this.)

In the comments thread for this post, Bill got me thinking again about a problem that's been bugging me for a while.

If there's one thing that we really want to get right as Web Beans goes from Public Draft to Proposed Final draft, it's integration with the Java EE platform. Up to this point, most of the work we've been doing as an EG was focused on nailing down the programming model, the semantics of the Web Beans services, and the behavior of the Web Bean manager. We've been writing the spec to assume that Web Beans implementations should be pluggable between different Java EE containers, because this is a direction that a lot of folks in the Java EE community believe that the EE platform should move in, and because we would like Web Beans to help show the way for other specifications such as EJB, JTA and perhaps even Servlets (note that JPA and JSF already support this).