Is CDI a good replacement of Spring?

Question

We are planning to write a web application from the scratch, it has been decided to go with the latest edition of Glassfish which complies to Java EE 6 standard, therefore we ar

Answer 1

I'm using Apache OpenWebBeans as CDI implementation and MyFaces CODI as portable extension for several projects. I'm very happy with it and I had no problems with it. OpenWebBeans currently lacks a bit in view of documentation but if you can't get something to work it's pretty easy to use the Maven Archetypes provided by MyFaces to generate simple projects with all the needed dependencies or you ask on the mailing list. It's so great if you just work on your Application and you aren't blocked by nasty bugs. I also did a lot of projects with Spring. It's ok, but if you ask what I would use for the next project the clear answer is OpenWebBeans and CODI! I prefer OpenWebBeans over Weld because OpenWebBeans is very adoptable that's great because you can customize more or less everything which isn't covered by the official CDI API/SPI and the runtimeperformance is better. And after the first project I would never question again CODI because it's very stable, they have regular releases and most of them brought great new features which improve the productivity a lot. CODI is IMHO the place which is most stable and were most innovations come from in the whole CDI land.

To answer your question: For me CDI completely replaced Spring, but you need portable extensions which fill the gaps. CDI as standard never intended to solve everything and some parts like the conversations are broken by design. The good news is that you have great projects like MyFaces CODI. CODI fixes almost all those issues.