[weld-dev] rationale for JTA/JPA questions - trying to add JPA support to archetypes

[Steven Boscarine]

So normally on JEE6, you'd user @PersistenceContext, right?  That's 
certainly the case if you're using JEE5 or Spring right now.  Therefore 
if switching containers or running in SE, they'd have to change all 
@PersitenceContext annotations to @Inject, correct?

If you're asking me, representing myself, I don't care much.  I don't 
get too worked up if I have to jump through a hoop or two to get the 
plumbing in my app configured.  I just want effective documentation to 
know how to get my job done.  At the end of the day, my users care about 
my application's features, reliability, and response time.  I know how 
to work my IDE's find and replace if I find myself in that situation.  
As an experienced user, I am used to working around "paper cuts."

Trying to put myself in the user's place, it'd be nice if their Java 
code could be switched between containers.  I think the platform looks 
better if there is minimal branching, especially on the Java side.  If 
we're reaching out to SE and Servlet users, it'd be ideal if they could 
use the same annotations.  However, I don't think this one tiny detail 
alone will be a big enough reason to lose a user.  As long as things are 
well documented, experienced professionals will just follow the 
directions to get the plumbing out of the way and move on to doing the 
interesting part of their application. 

IMO the biggest concern will be when writing examples.  I think the less 
motivated and experienced users will get frustrated when they paste a 
sample from an example app, blog post, or documentation and get a null 
pointer exception.  Will JEE6 users get a NPE if they use @Inject 
EntityManager em; without special configuration?

Why is it so much more difficult to inject via @PersistenceContext than 
@Inject? 

Gavin King wrote:
> That's more or less an easy problem to solve. But why do you want to
> inject it using @PersistenceContext instead of @Inject??
>
>