In Relation To

Some people have wondered why CDI requires an explicit @Named annotation before a bean can be accessed using EL? Why not just give all beans names by default?

Congratulations to the whole AS team on the release of version 6! JBoss AS 6 is a Java EE 6 compliant application server, so it includes built-in support for many of the technologies we talk about here: CDI, JPA 2, Bean Validation, EJB 3.1, JSF 2.0, Servlets 3.0, along with many major enhancements in other areas.

Andy Glover wrote an excellent article about Hibernate Shards a few weeks ago. (It seems we missed linking to it here.)

A few folks have been asking what the hell's happened to me, and I realized that I have not posted anything here for like 6 months. Well, the truth is, apart from recently becoming a father, I've been quite busy with a really exciting new project. And yeah, my head is full of a hundred interesting things I could blog about, but, unfortunately, the new project is super-duper secret for now, so I'll have to keep a lid on it until we're ready for an alpha release (perhaps another 6 months from now).

Norman Richards has left Red Hat to work for a startup company. Thanks, Norman, for all your work on the Seam project over the last 4 years, and good luck with your new endeavor.

Via TSS, I found this excellent post. Unfortunately, while I appreciate the sentiment (hell, I'm not so young and commitment-free no more), I'm simply not convinced that these things are actually myths. Sure, age discrimination sucks, I guess, and I'd like them to be myths, but is it really a myth that:

Wow, we are on fire. :-)

The guys at Caucho have an interesting write up about their decision to aim for EE 6 Web Profile compliance. It's worth hearing their take on the new platform.

With the release of Java EE 6, I've seen a number of recurring, but rather curious, arguments against upgrading to the new platform. These are usually deployed by folks who are using a homegrown stack consisting of a servlet engine like Tomcat or Jetty together with a number of open source frameworks like Hibernate and Spring.

Since the release of Weld and Java EE 6, there's been a heap of activity in the Weld user forum, and especially a lot of questions about problems related to framework development. You can do some kinds of generic programming in CDI just using managed beans, producer methods and InjectionPoint. But if you want to get serious, you're eventually going to have to embrace the portable extension SPI. Here's a couple of examples of how people are using this SPI.