[webbeans-dev] Web Bean discovery

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...