Weld: News - tagged as "release"

Weld 3.0.0.Alpha5

2015-2-25 release , cdi2 Jozef Hartinger

Weld 3.0.0.Alpha5, the latest release in the series of CDI 2.0 prototypes, has been released. The highlights of the release include new Bean builder API and many improvements to Weld Probe.

Bean Builder API

The common way for frameworks and libraries to expose their API to applications via CDI is by using producer methods. An alternative approach is a custom implementation of the javax.enterprise.inject.spi.Bean interface that is registered by a CDI portable extension. This latter approach gives the extension more control but is also less straightforward.

One of the goals of CDI 2.0 is to fill this gap and simplify extension development. This Weld release comes with a preview of the Bean builder API. The API is inspired by Bean builder API provided by DeltaSpike. In addition, Java 8 lambdas are used in the API to simplify the entire process even further.

Here’s an example of a simple extension that builds and registers a bean:

void register(@Observes ExperimentalAfterBeanDiscovery event) {
        event.addBean()
            .addType(Integer.class)
            .addQualifier(Random.LITERAL)
            .produceWith(() -> new java.util.Random().nextInt(1000));
    }

That’s it! Likewise, it is easy to can define a bean with custom disposal logic using a lambda expression:

void register(@Observes ExperimentalAfterBeanDiscovery event) {
        event.addBean()
            .addType(Connection.class)
            .produceWith(this::newConnection)
            .disposeWith(connection -> connection.close());
    }

See the BeanBuilder Javadoc for more information.

Event monitoring with Probe

We introduced Probe in the previous blog post. This release adds event monitoring view to Probe. In this view both system and application events are displayed. The events can be filtered by type and qualifiers. It is also possible to track which observer methods a particular event was delivered to.

Further improvements

In addition, there were a couple of minor improvements to Probe, namely:

better filtering of invocation trees - Probe now searches the whole tree, not just the entry points
the context view now displays the conversation context
Probe is now more careful and does not try to bind interceptors to classes that are not proxyable
all the configuration options for Probe are now documented

The easiest way to get Probe to run locally is to patch WildFly with a Weld patch. If you’re not familiar with patching WildFly, check Markus’s tutorial.

Relaxed construction

CDI requires that beans that are normal-scoped, intercepted or decorated always define a no-argument constructor. This requirement applies even if the bean already defines an @Inject annotated constructor with parameters. This is purely a technical requirement implied by how Java allocates class instances.

Weld is however able to operate fine even if this requirement is not met. Weld uses special non-portable JVM APIs that allow it to allocate proxy instances without calling proxy’s constructor. This mode is non-portable and needs to be explicitly enabled using a configuration option.

This mode is not new but has been neglected in the past. For this release we added a bunch of tests for this mode, fixed a lot of bugs and enabled it by default in Weld-SE. Any feedback on this mode is appreciated.

[ Experimental API documentation ] [ Release notes ] [ Distribution ] [ Patch for Wildfly (8.2, 9 Alpha) ]

Weld 3.0.0.Alpha4

2015-2-5 release , cdi2 Jozef Hartinger

Here we are again with the next Alpha release of Weld 3. This time there are no additional CDI 2.0 previews. Instead, this release contains multiple performance improvements, enables @Asynchronous calls to be implemented simply with CDI interceptors and most importantly, it comes with weld-probe.

Weld Probe

Why isn’t my field injected? Why isn’t my interceptor triggered? What extensions do third-party libraries register?

Have you ever found yourself asking a similar question? Making Weld developer-friendly and helpful in troubleshooting is our priority. Yet, similar problems still occur sometimes.

But we can do event better! In Alpha4 of Weld 3 we are introducing a new tool called Weld Probe. Probe is a built-in tool that provides a detailed view into internals of a CDI application. Weld Probe has a web UI and is provided out-of-the-box.

Probe makes it easy to inspect:

beans, their properties such as qualifiers, stereotypes and name
a graph of bean dependencies
observers and producers declared by beans
interceptors and decorators bound to a bean
extensions
information about current contextual instances
tracking of invocations and invocation trees

Plus more addons are planned in future.

To try probe all that needs to be done is to upgrade to Alpha4, enable the development mode and point your browser to the URL of your CDI application plus /weld-probe suffix.

For more thorough overview of what Probe provides see Martin’s blog post or the reference documentation.

Bear in mind that Probe is still work in progress and that this early preview may have defects here and there.

Implementing @Asynchronous using CDI interceptor

It is possible to implement a substitute for EJB @Asynchronous method calls using CDI interceptors. Arjan Tijms recently blogged about his solution A similar one can be found in Weld’s testsuite. Long story short: This would not work smoothly until now because of a limitation in Weld. This limitation is now gone in Alpha4.

Performance

This release integrates various runtime performance improvements mainly around bean instance construction, producer and observer method invocation.

Weld 3.0.0.Alpha5 is planned in 3 weeks time from now, with some more CDI 2.0 previews. We are going to continue releasing Alpha versions of Weld 3.0 roughly every 3 weeks until the early draft of CDI 2.0, which should happen sometime in March. At that point, we’ll move to Beta releases.

In the meantime, we’d like to hear your feedback on Probe or on Weld 3.0 Alpha releases in general. Feel free to use our forums or #weld-dev on freenode