[webbeans-dev] Drop pluggability

[Gavin King]

I'm getting a bunch of feedback to the effect that the Web Beans spec
should drop the notion of a pluggable Web Bean manager.

I'm prepared to go down this path on the condition that we reach
agreement with the EE group that Web Beans will be a required part of
the Java EE 6 web profile, which is something that has not yet been
agreed (however, I believe that agreement will eventually be
achieved).

This would be a major simplifying change to the spec:

* it would immediately close off most of the open issues mentioned in
the Public Draft
* we could stop talking about a "Web Bean manager", and simply talk
about the "container", where "container" would be defined to refer to
either the Java EE container, or the embedded EJB Lite container in
the SE case
* we could remove several special cases where functionality "is not
required when a plugin Web Bean manager runs in a Java EE 5
environment"
* it would help avoid giving the impression that web beans is a
separate component model with a separate container

Of course, the downside of this change is that implementations of 299
would no longer be pluggable in different EE environments. This simply
doesn't seem like much of a big deal to me - at least not unless Web
Beans is an optional feature of EE6, in which case the pluggability
contracts are required for people to even be able to use Web Beans in
EE when their vendor does not support the optional feature.

I would like to know if anyone here is especially attached to
pluggability and would be upset by the removal of this feature. I
would especially like to know if this would affect anyone's plans to
*implement* 299.

-- 
Gavin King
gavin.king at gmail.com
http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Gavin
http://hibernate.org
http://seamframework.org