JSR 299 (Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java) looks pretty good

I remember looking at an early draft of what used to be called the Web Beans JSR and it kinda looked a bit like 'hey lets try standardize Seam'. It didn't strike me as being too relevant or useful to folks typically using Spring/Guice to build their applications.

However I've just had another look at the lastest draft and its now looking pretty good. The rename to Contexts and Dependency Injection for Java certainly helps.

Dependency Injection is such a cross cutting concern throughout the Java ecosystem - its also a very well understood problem space with a small number of popular implementations. We really should have a set of standard annotations for Dependency Injection above the basics in JSR 250 so we really can write framework agnostic code that can work in more than one DI container. So far JSR 299 is the best effort I've seen to try come up with a standard.

Ironcially the annotations used in JSR 299 are almost exactly the same as those used in Guice 2 (@Produces/@Provides, @Named, @BindingAnnotation/@BindingType etc). Also Spring has started adding more and more annotation based dependency injection support of late; so the various approaches are kinda unifying a little.

So with a bit of effort it should be pretty easy to implement the dependency injection parts of JSR 299 in both Guice and Spring; so then we'd have a real, useful, dependency injection standard working across all the main DI frameworks.

I wonder if the Spring & Guice folks will put petty politics aside and really get behind JSR 299 for the good of the Java ecosystem?

Easier Integration & Pattern testing with Camel and Spring 2.5

I'm really liking the testing features in Spring 2.5.x for easier unit testing with JUnit 3.8, 4.x or TestNG using Spring to do all your dependency injection before invoking your test classes.

I've just created a little document to show how to use Spring Testing with Camel, using the Camel Mock and Test endpoints for easier Enterprise Integration Pattern based testing. Incidentally Camel now has a new little Test endpoint which creates a Mock endpoint that automatically pulls its expected message bodies from another endpoint and auto-wires up the expectations for easier testing with minimal coding.