On 15 May 2009, at 17:26, Dan Allen wrote:

On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 5:26 AM, Nicklas Karlsson <nickarls@gmail.com> wrote:
Seam could have a "hacks" module that would add the binding type and
producer method ;-)

Maybe 10 beers in you can convince me, but I don't see using the HTTP contexts as hacks. To me, they have been around for 10+ years and software uses them. That is a reality. You walk into any technical manager's office and try to tell them you can't use contexts anymore and they will gladly show you the door and hire some programmer willing to use them. There is software in an ivory tower and there is real life. We are stupid not to offer some way to access these contexts. Can we advocate not to .... sure, fine, but I still think it is stupid to pretend they don't exist.

Dan, stop using crazy FUD ;-)

1) JCDI provides a good way to use contextual data, through beans. The API is neat, unified and declarative
2) JCDI provides a way to manage the lifecycle of your data in the contexts directly should you prefer through Contextual. This isn't recommended
3) JCDI doesn't stop you accessing the contexts directly by accessing the request, session etc. One of the modules Seam should supply is manager objects for the HttpSession, ServletContext and HttpRequest.

Anyway, Matt's suggestion of exposing the attribute maps from these as a Map is reasonably neat, and I guess we could do that - some abstraction is definitely not a good idea though.

Maybe make something in sandbox to start with, and see how popular it is?