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Chapter 13. Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI)

13.1. Introduction to CDI

13.1.1. About Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI)

Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) 1.2 is a JSR specification, which defines a general-purpose dependency injection framework in the Java language. Although originally conceived for the Java EE platform, CDI can also be used in the context of an OSGi container, provided the requisite adapter layer (a combination of Pax CDI and JBoss Weld) is installed and enabled.

CDI 1.2 release is treated as a maintenance release of 1.1. Details about CDI 1.1 can be found in JSR 346: Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java™ EE 1.1.

JBoss Fuse includes Weld, which is the reference implementation of JSR-346:Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java™ EE 1.1.

Benefits of CDI

The benefits of CDI include:

  • Simplifying and shrinking your code base by replacing big chunks of code with annotations.
  • Flexibility, allowing you to disable and enable injections and events, use alternative beans, and inject non-CDI objects easily.
  • Optionally, allowing you to include beans.xml in your META-INF/ or WEB-INF/ directory if you need to customize the configuration to differ from the default. The file can be empty.
  • Simplifying packaging and deployments and reducing the amount of XML you need to add to your deployments.
  • Providing lifecycle management via contexts. You can tie injections to requests, sessions, conversations, or custom contexts.
  • Providing type-safe dependency injection, which is safer and easier to debug than string-based injection.
  • Decoupling interceptors from beans.
  • Providing complex event notification.

13.1.2. JBoss Weld CDI Implementation

Weld is the reference implementation of CDI, which is defined in JSR 346: Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java™ EE 1.1. Weld was inspired by Seam 2 and other dependency injection frameworks, and is included in JBoss Fuse.