Hi, The JSF 2.0 spec requires an implementation to support several annotations, like @ManagedBean. Has anyone already thought of a possible implementation for this requirement?
IMHO, there is only one option, and that is scanning the classpath at application startup, because you don't want the overhead with every EL expression. But there are some issues with this: First, what paths to scan? AFAIK the spec doesn't state the classpaths to scan. I suppose only /WEB-INF/lib and /WEB-INF/classes need to be checked, but I can't find it in the spec. And second, how to scan? Reading each *.class file, then creating a Class instance and then using reflection to scan for annotations is probably very expensive. Not only the processing time, but I think it will also become a memory issue because every class in the classpath will be loaded into memory. Scanning the plain *.class files is probably not very practical. I don't know, never tried it, but the class files I've seen don't look very appealing. :-) It might be an idea to look at Scannotation, which is an open source library for scanning jar files for annotations. It works quite good and it has the advantage of being very efficient because it doesn't use the default Class/Reflection mechanism. http://sourceforge.net/projects/scannotation/ The project homepage says it has an Apache 2.0 license, but at the same time it has a dependency on Javassist (licensed LGPL or MPL) and the source files don't contain any headers, so it may be not an option. I don't know, IANAL. I was playing around with a @ManagedBean annotation parser, but It may be a good idea to have a discussion on this subject since it probably has some impact. What do you think? Regards, Jan-Kees
