David Blevins and I have been hoping that it would be possible to avoid loading
all the classes in an application when "deploying" it into OWB. Mark has been
telling me that this won't work.
It's pretty easy to scan the application and find all the classes with relevant
annotations and all the classes that are injected into something using ASM so
all the other classes aren't loaded. However I now see that there's a
BeanManager method
public Set<Bean<?>> getBeans(Type beanType, Annotation... bindings)
where you can pass in an arbitrary class and get the possible beans back.
This certainly means that just finding all the beans referenced in ways such as
the injection targets or having a name is not sufficient. I can think of a
couple ways to proceed that might help:
1. eagerly create and register Bean<X> for classes that are easy to identify as
above and lazily create Bean<X> for otherwise unidentifiable beans on demand.
I haven't found anything in the spec that says tis can't be done but haven't
looked very hard.
2. We can identify some classes during scanning that can't be beans, (e.g.
having only non-default constructors not annotated with @Inject) and exclude
only these from consideration. This would be pretty easy but is apt to load
many more classes than we'd like.
3. Modify the AbstractOWBBean and AnnotatedTypeImpl so they lazily load the
bean class. I haven't investigated, so maybe the bean class is needed
immediately. I wonder if it might not be needed immediately for beans with no
annotations.
Thoughts or advice?
thanks
david jencks
