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.

Steven Verborgh has written a nice tutorial showing how to implement a custom JSF view scope for CDI. Henri Chen has integrated the ZK framework with CDI (hopefully other web frameworks won't be far behind). Matt Corey has been experimenting with environment configuration via JNDI.

Meanwhile, I've been working on compiling user feedback into a list of enhancements to the SPI. We plan to roll the most important items into the first CDI maintenance release.

UPDATE: for completeness, I should also link Pete Royle's Quartz scheduling extension.

As I'm sure you've all seen, Java EE 6 has gone final. You can now download the Final Release of the Contexts and Dependency Injection, Bean Validation, Java Persistence API 2 and Java Servlet 3 specifications from jcp.org, and read the linked javadoc for the entire platform. It's also a good chance to check out the Java API for RESTful Web Services specification, which now includes CDI integration, if you havn't already.

Sun have also published a three-part overview of the new platform and the Java EE 6 tutorial and sample applications.

It's just fantastic to finally see the fruits of all that work :-)

The Java EE 6 platform, along with Contexts and Dependency Injection, Bean Validation, EJB 3.1, JPA 2 and Servlet 3 have just been approved by the JCP EC. This completely changes the landscape for people developing web and enterprise applications in Java. There's just so much to digest here, and so many problems that are finally solved. EE 6 is something of a new start, and the beginning of a whole new ecosystem. Congratulations!

InfoQ has published a their questions and my answers about CDI and Weld.

Today, Red Hat submitted the final draft of JSR-299[1], which now goes under the moniker CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection), along with the Reference Implementation and TCK. Check out the spec[1] and Javadoc.

This specification defines a powerful set of complementary services that help improve the structure of application code.

• A well-defined lifecycle for stateful objects bound to lifecycle contexts, where the set of contexts is extensible
• A sophisticated, typesafe dependency injection mechanism, including the ability to select dependencies at either development or deployment time, without verbose configuration
• Support for Java EE modularity and the Java EE component architecture - the modular structure of a Java EE application is taken into account when resolving dependencies between Java EE components
• Integration with the Unified Expression Language (EL), allowing any contextual object to be used directly within a JSF or JSP page
• The ability to decorate injected objects
• The ability to associate interceptors to objects via typesafe interceptor bindings
• An event notification model
• A web conversation context in addition to the three standard web contexts defined by the Java Servlets specification
• An SPI allowing portable extensions to integrate cleanly with the container

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Expert Group and everyone else who contributed ideas and criticism to this specification. Folks outside the JCP probably can't really imagine the incredible investment of time and emotional energy that it takes to create a spec like this. I would really, really like to single out a couple of individual members of the EG for their great ideas and totally uncompensated work, but I guess there's no way to do that without leaving someone feeling unrecognized.

On a more personal note, I believe (and hope) that we've done right by the community, and created something beautiful.

Tomorrow we'll be releasing Weld 1.0.