Arjan Tijms' Weblog

In Java EE's CDI, beans can be augmented via 2 artefacts; Decorators and Interceptors . Decorators are typically owned by the application code and can decorate a bean that's shipped by the container ( build-in beans ) or a library. Interceptors are typically shipped by a library and can be applied (bound) to a bean that's owned by the application. So how do you bind a library shipped interceptor to a library shipped/build-in bean? In CDI 1.2 and before this wasn't really possible, but in CDI 2.0 we can take advantage of the new InterceptionFactory to do just this. It's not entirely trivial yet, but it's doable. In this article we'll demonstrate how to apply the @RememberMe interceptor binding from the new Java EE 8 Security spec to a build-in bean of type HttpAuthenticationMechanism , which is from the Security spec as well. First we configure our authentication mechanism by means of the following annotation: @BasicAuthenticationMechanismDefin...

An extensionless URL is a URL without a final suffix like .xhtml , .html , .jsp , etc. Such a suffix is seen as technical "clutter" that's hard to remember for humans. Servers often need it though to route a request to the right controller. JSF, a Java EE MVC framework, has supported extensionless URLs for some time via PrettyFaces (now merged to the general Rewrite framework) and OmniFaces . Both of these solutions used various workarounds to trick JSF into working with extensionless URLs. Though JSF 2.3 does, unfortunately, still not support extensionless URLs fully out of the box via e.g. a single parameter, it can provide support for it by basically combining the new support for exact mapping and the API for obtaining a list of all view resources . Additionally combining this with the Servlet 3.1 feature for dynamically adding Servlet mappings and some JDK8 streaming and lambdas, makes it possible to enable extensionless support with just 2 statements (albeit so...

A while ago we wrote about CDIs ability to dynamically add Bean<T> instances to the CDI runtime. A Bean<T> is a kind of factory for beans, that makes types available for injection, lookup via the bean manager , or by referencing them in expression language. CDI producers (via the @Produces annotation) fulfil a somewhat similar role, but they essentially only make the "create instance" method dynamic; the rest (like scope, types, etc) is more or less static. A programmatically added Bean<T> essentially makes all those aspects dynamic. As the previous article showed, dynamically adding such Bean<T> is a bit more work and it's quite verbose, as well as a little complex as the developer has to find out what to return as a default for various methods that are not directly of interest. CDI 2.0 has addressed some of the above issues by providing a very convenient builder that not only makes creating a Bean<T> instance far less verbose, bu...

JSF aka JavaServer Faces is a component based MVC framework that's part of Java EE and is one of the oldest Java MVC frameworks that's still supported and actively used (version 1.0 was released in 2004 ). Over time, Java EE itself has grown considerably and as such the resources required to maintain and evolve Java EE have grown as well. Now Oracle has indicated at several occasions that it just doesn't have the resources required for this, and for most constituent specs of Java EE it can do at most small updates, but in other cases can't do any updates at all. In order to lessen this immense burden on Oracle somewhat, the community has largely taken over for JSF 2.3 and Java EE Security API 1.0. The following graph (taken from a presentation by JSF spec lead Ed Burns) gives an indication: The question is how to continue for JSF.next ? Since the community has largely taken over JSF already, should this perhaps be made more formal by actually letting the ...

The proposed final draft (PDF) of the Servlet 4.0 spec has just been made available at GitHub . The major new feature is HTTP/2 support and specifically the push support that comes with it. Java EE already has support for push via WebSockets (including WebSocket support in JSF 2.3 ), but there are other interesting changes as well, such as for instance the Mapping Discovery API . The following contains a terse list of changes, taken from section A.1 of the above linked Servlet 4.0 PFD document. All mentioned references to sections are to that document. Requirement to support HTTP/2, see Section 1.2, “What is a Servlet Container?” on page 1-1 and “What is a Servlet?” on page 1 1. This includes HTTP/2 server push, see “HTTP/2 Server Push” on page 3 29. Modify javadoc for ServletContext getAttribute() and getInitParameter(), specify that NullPointerException must be thrown if the argument “name” is null. Modify javadoc for ServletContext.setAttribute() and setInitParameter() to...

After a long and at times intense spec and development process the JSF 2.3 EG is proud to announce that today we've released JSF 2.3 . JSF (JavaServer Faces), is a component based MVC framework that's part of Java EE. JSF 2.3 in particular is part of Java EE 8. Major new features in JSF 2.3 are a tighter integration with CDI, support for WebSockets, a really cool component search expression framework (donated by PrimeFaces ), basic support for extensionless URLs, and class level bean validation. The age old native managed beans of JSF 2.3 have finally been deprecated (although they are still available for now) in favour of CDI. It's expected that these will be fully removed (pruned) in a future release. The JSF 2.3 EG would like to thank everyone who contributed to JSF in whatever way, by creating bug reports, testing builds, providing comments and insights on the mailinglist and contributing code. Without those community contributions JSF 2.3 would not have been...