[weld-dev] FYI: Plan of action for archetypes updates (javax.*-else-org.jboss.spec.javax.*)

[Steven Boscarine]

Hello All,
To give an update to the community and ask for your input...

The weld archetypes need to be updated.  While weld and JSF work great, 
some other Java EE 6 APIs are missing, like EJB 3.1 and Servlet 3.0.

Sun/Oracle has not yet published official javax.* jars for key APIs like 
EJB 3.1, so we have to rely on jars from other vendors.  For example, 
JBoss has made their EJB 3.1 API jars available as 
http://repository.jboss.org/maven2/org/jboss/spec/javax/ejb/jboss-ejb-api_3.1_spec/1.0.0.Beta1/

The goal of the Java EE half of weld archetypes (in contrast to the 
servlet versions) has creeped a bit from being just for weld development 
to being an archetype for Java EE 6.0 development.  This is because it 
is pretty difficult to do much useful work with Weld and JSF alone.  
Most developers will need the full Java EE stack, including other APIs 
such as JPA and EJB.  We'd like to provide those APIs in the archetypes, 
but the official javax.* API jars are either not available at all or not 
published to Maven Central.

Therefore, the strategy going forward will be to use an official javax.* 
jar either from Maven Central or from the JBoss repo if it's legally 
allowed to be redistributed, but not yet on central.  Otherwise, we'll 
be using the org.jboss.spec.javax.* equivalent API jar.

The org.jboss.spec.javax.* jars work just fine on Glassfish and 
presumably other containers, they're just published with the JBoss 
namespace.

We'll test the archetypes in JBoss AS 6 and Glassfish v3.  If anyone 
wants to help out with other containers, we'd be happy to work with you 
on that as well.

Does anyone see any concerns with this approach?

The key question is if you're not using JBoss AS, will you be put off so 
much by seeing a provided-scoped dependency of 
org.jboss.spec.javax.ejb.jboss-ejb-api_3.1_spec-1.0.0.Beta1 that you'll 
give up all hope on these archetypes, go somewhere else and blog nasty 
things about all of us?  :)

Thanks,
Steven