Java EE 6 and the snowball effect

Java EE application servers increase their feature sets (APIs and administration features) whilst business applications get smaller and smaller. This introduces a new issue: if you need a single feature of a new application server version you'll get a complete package of features that you didn't need in the first place (the snowball effect). Let me give you an example: in WebSphere 7 IBM provides a high speed integration adapter for IMS assets. We need that, but we don't need all the rest that gives us a headache in terms of migration efforts. Now, if the amount of APIs increase in Java EE with every version, I predict that this problem starts to get more and more complicated. That's a reason why I don't appreciate the fact that Java EE standardizes former framework functionality like dependency injection (CDI). Business applications may get smaller, but application server feature sets get huge this way. Is that a good trend?

JSR-299 CDI Decorators for Spring beans

This blog is about my new Spring-CDI modules effort. It's pupose is to make useful CDI patterns like decorators or interceptors available to a Spring application. I do believe that the explicit pattern implementation in CDI is very useful. It makes it obvious and simple to use patterns for not so experienced developers. Therefore I decided to investigate how to make those patterns and the corresponding CDI annotations available for Spring managed beans. Here is the current status of my work. If you're interested and you have some time left, take a look or try out my early version of the Spring-CDI decorator module. The set-up is straight forward. You'll find all you need below.

Integration testing scoped beans in CDI 1.0 and Spring 3.1

In this blog post I describe how to do integration testing with scoped beans in Spring and CDI. Everything is illustrated with small code samples. Integration testing with scopes is not particular easy. Imagine a bean that lives in the session scope, like UserCredentials. In an integration test you typically have no HttpRequest or HttpSession to work on (at least if you are not doing tests that include your user interface). Therefore you need some infrastructure for integration testing. With both technologies it is a little puzzling to get this infrastructure going. Get your own picture of it.

Custom scopes in CDI 1.0 and Spring 3.1

This blog post describes in short how to implement custom scopes in CDI using Weld 1.1 and Spring 3.1. To get basic information on scoping see the Spring reference or the Weld reference respectively.