[jsr-314-open] [ADMIN] Proposal Faces Managed Bean Annotations For Containers that implement Servlet 2.5 and Beyond

[Ed Burns]

This is likely new to most of you, but we need to make a small,
non-technical, change to the way we think of our annotations related to
Managed Beans in JSF 2.0.  First, some background.

Fact

  JSF2 will be final several months before Java EE6 becomes final.  JSF2
  will do a maintenance release to synchronize with EE6.

Corollary

  JSF2 must not depend on any features defined in Java EE 6.
  Thankfully, we have no such features.  No, wait a minute...

Recent development

  A movement is afoot at the EE platform level to extract the concept of
  managed beans from JSF and move it into its own specification, which
  would be a core part of Java EE 6.  EJB, JSF, and Web Beans would then
  depend on this concept.  This naturally would include the annotations
  relating to managed beans which we have in JSF 2.0.  The EE Platform
  is now directing the JSF EG to make changes to accomodate this recent
  development.

Options

  1. Drop the managed bean annotation feature for JSF2.0, adding it back
  for the JSF2 Maintenance Release for EE6.

  2. Find some way to keep the managed bean annotation feature for JSF
  2.0 that will be compatible with EE6.

I've seen the smiles on peoples faces when I present JSF 2.0 and I get
to the @ManagedBean @RequestScoped part.  I couldn't bare to disappoint
users that will be using JSF 2.0 outside of JavaEE 6.

Here is Roberto Chinnici's implementation of option 2 which is specified
in this snapshot [1].  I have modified our code for generating javadocs
to create a separate top level javadoc bundle containing only the
annotations relating to managed beans.  JSF 2.0 implementations are
strongly encouraged to implement this additional specification, but it
is optional.

This is simply a change in how we think about these annotations, not in
the way they are specified or implemented, though they have been moved
to a new package: javax.faces.bean.

ACTION: I really don't have much leverage here so if you disagree with
this, you'll have to take it up with your organization's JSR-316
representative. 

[1] https://javaserverfaces-spec-public.dev.java.net/files/documents/1936/130753/jsf-spec-2.0-20090325.zip


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