Web Beans and patterns

[asookazian]

Most Web Beans are stateful and contextual.

So if you want to write a DAO layer, which is typically a stateless JavaBean or SLSB implementation, would that be a Web Bean component or not typically?

What is a Web Bean?

A Web Bean is an application class that contains business logic.

But what if our SLSB DAO needs DI?  Then it may be a Web Bean.

Sounds like Web Beans may be injected into other Web Beans (SFSB injected into SFSB like in Seam) and may be used as backing beans for JSF pages.

[gavin.king]

So if you want to write a DAO layer, which is typically a stateless JavaBean or SLSB implementation, would that be a Web Bean component or not typically?

According to the spec, all JavaBeans and session beans are web beans (that's not the terminology we use anymore) so, yes.

But what if our SLSB DAO needs DI?

All EJBs can inject stuff using 299. All session beans can be injected using 299.

[asookazian]

In a Seam 2.x app, we designate a class (whether it's a session bean or JavaBean) as a Seam component using @Name("foo").

Now there is @Named in 299.  What happens if we do not use @Named on our class?  And what if I do not want a particular JavaBean or EJB to be a Web Bean?  In Seam, we simply do not use the @Name annotation on the class and it's not scanned/installed as a Seam component into the Seam container during deployment of the app.

btw, the first reference to @Named is here:

2.4. Scopes

in the contexts-1_0-pfd-spec.pdf I just downloaded from jcp.org.

There is no explanation of that annotation until later (2.6.1).  It should be explained at the first occurrence for obvious reasons (or call out the explanation deferment explicitly to section 2.6.1 where it is currently explained).

So from 2.6.1 it sounds like you use @Named so you can reference a bean in a JSF page directly.  And thus it's optional.

This is somewhat confusing now that the term web bean has been eradicated from the latest spec.

For example, in the very first section, Chapter 1. Architecture, it seems that some definitions are skipped.

This specification provides a powerful new set of services to Java EE components.

What exactly are Java EE components (Servlets, EJBs, JavaBeans?) and does 299 apply to all of them?

The lifecycle and interactions of *stateful components* bound to well-defined lifecycle contexts, where the set of contexts is extensible.

Again what exactly are the stateful components that are referred to here?  SFSBs?  Anything else?

It's almost like there needs to be a cross-reference or footnote to the EE 6 spec to clear some confusion here...

[asookazian]

It would help to read the entire spec I suppose:

1.2. Relationship to other specifications
An application developer creates Java EE components such as EJBs, servlets and JavaBeans and then provides additional metadata that declares additional behavior defined by this specification.