I'm big into CDI, but I'm not fond of application servers at all. So I'm bound to find out how to configure how to activate the CDI magic on a simple servlet container like Tomcat. That shouldn't be too difficult. Mind you, it's easy to run Weld (which happens to be the reference implementation of CDI) without a servlet container. However, in the past getting Weld on Tomcat proved to be a tad difficult, due to mediocre documentation.
Luckily, that has changed.
Jo Desmet (at least I suppose he's the man behind the Musings in Java blog) has published a nice walk-through to get CDI and JSF on Tomcat 8 up and running. I followed his step-by-step tutorial and managed to activate CDI on my Tomcat 8 in a couple of minutes. Highly recommended!
However, no tutorial is so good it can't be improved, so let me add one or two notes on it:
- For some reason, declaring JTA and JSF as provided API and runtime implementation didn't work for me. In theory, it should work, but I ended up adding both as compile time dependencies.
- Jo didn't say precisely where to put the
context.xml and the beans.xml. I chose to put put into the src/main/webapp folder. To be pedantic, the context.xml went into the src/main/webapp/META-INF folder, and the beans.xml file went into the src/main/webapp/WEB-INF folder. (From what I remember from earlier experiments, both file should also work when put into the classpath - but I didn't take the time to check this, too).
Cutting a long story short, you don't need a full-blown application server just to use CDI!
Zakee-Web: a project template supporting CDI, JSF and JAX-RS on a Tomcat
My fork of Zakee-Web