CDI Beans

JSF pioneered the concept of “managed beans” in web applications. However, JSF managed beans are fairly limited. JSR 299 (“Contexts and Dependency Injection”, often abbreviated as CDI) defines a more flexible model for beans that are managed by the application server. These beans are bound to a context (such as the current request, a browser session, or even a user-defined life cycle context). CDI specifies mechanisms for injecting beans, intercepting and decorating method calls, and firing and observing events. Because CDI is a much more powerful mechanism than JSF managed beans, it makes sense to use CDI beans if you deploy your application in a Java EE application server. A Java EE 6 compliant application server, such as GlassFish, automatically supports CDI.