John + Christian: I don't want to mix layers. The beans I need to have initialized are in the service layer of my application, where I can't depend on web APIs.
Eager instantiation of application scoped beans is a meaningful feature in a Java SE CDI environment. This should work without a servlet container. Mark: Yes I know there is a gap (isn't there a new event in CDI 1.1 to adress this?) - anyway, the solution seems to work for me on JBoss AS 7.2, which is all I need at the moment ;-) Best regards, Harald
