CDI and Bean Validation in Java EE 5 Application Server?

Question

CDI and Bean Validation are Java EE 6 Standard Specifications. Nevertheless, I can use both within Java EE 5 Application Servers (and also within Java SE) by just adding the libraries to the project.

Is this correct?

Are there any disadvantages of using both in Java EE 5 application servers instead of Java EE 6 application servers?

I have to use the Oracle 11 g Suite and JDeveloper. In the meantime, JDeveloper supports JSF 2.0, but I cannot find any support for Bean Validation or CDI. Nevertheless, this is not a problem. There is no IDE support (for code-generation, a step-by-step-guide, or whatever), but I can use these libraries by using the simple java editor. Right?

Answer 1

Java EE 6 is basically a collection of APIs. An application server is Java EE 6 compliant if it implements all those specifications. But you can still use the APIs in an Java EE 5 compliant application server. Some people even put EJBs into Tomcat, so technically that's possible. Still it makes sense to use a compliant AS, as it also provides all the services related to the specs.

Answer 2

I believe that's correct.

The disadvantage is that you're a version behind. You may have to modify your code if and when you decide to upgrade to Java EE 6 (eg new imports, etc.)

Answer 3

You can pretty easily add Apache OpenWebBeans or JBoss Weld (choose one of the 2 CDI implementations) to your WEB-INF/lib and register the servlet listeners in your web.xml manually. Voila, then you have CDI support!

For JSR-303 Bean Validation it's a bit more tricky, because only JPA2 and JSF2 makes use of it. So you would need to add Myfaces2 and Hibernate-3.5, EclipseLink2 or OpenJPA2 to your local jars and disable the container provided variants.