[webbeans-dev] Web Bean discovery

[Pete Muir]

I was talking to Gavin about this, and he suggested that the discovery  
should be more flexible and allow selectors/restrictions to be applied  
to the classes discovered (for example, only abstract classes).

I can only speak about JBoss5, but I suspect this approach is common -  
JBoss allows you to attach a visitor to the deployer and allows you to  
do something with classes it finds (e.g. store them in some data  
structure). This happens before web apps (from the Servlet listener)  
starts.

The current approach is to discover the resources needed (as defined  
by the spec) and store them in a datastructure, which is available  
later for querying when we boot the Web Beans RI through the  
ServletListener. So, the only way I can see to be more flexible is to  
add the ability to apply selectors to the WebBeanDiscovery interface,  
and index the classes discovered based on selectors in the jboss- 
webbeans integration library. This requires us to define the selectors  
we can use. We already have:

* Modifier (for discovering abstract classes)
* TYPE annotations

are there any others we are likely to need - it is better to define  
these upfront before we do a release of the WebBeanDiscovery API...