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Backing beans (@ManagedBean) or CDI Beans (@Named)?

Asked 2010-12-03T16:05:11.290
116

I've just started reading through Core JavaServer Faces, 3rd Ed. and they say this (emphasis mine):

It is a historical accident that there are two separate mechanisms, CDI beans and JSF managed beans, for beans that can be used in JSF pages. We suggest that you use CDI beans unless your application must work on a plain servlet runner such as Tomcat.

Why? They don't provide any justification. I've been using @ManagedBean for all the beans in a prototype application running on GlassFish 3, and I haven't really noticed any issues with this. I don't especially mind migrating from @ManagedBean to @Named, but I want to know why I should bother.

jsf jakarta-ee jsf-2 cdi
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2 Answers

183

Use CDI.

As per JSF 2.3, @ManagedBean is deprecated. See also spec issue 1417. This means that there's not anymore a reason to choose @ManagedBean over @Named. This was first implemented in Mojarra 2.3.0 beta version m06.

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Since Faces 4.0, the @ManagedBean has been removed as per spec issue 1547.

History

The core difference is, @ManagedBean is managed by JSF framework and is only via @ManagedProperty available to another JSF managed beans. @Named is managed by application server (the container) via CDI framework and is via @Inject available to any kind of a container managed artifact like @WebListener, @WebFilter, @WebServlet, @Path, @Stateless, etc and even a JSF @ManagedBean. From the other side on, @ManagedProperty does not work inside a @Named or any other container managed artifact. It works really only inside @ManagedBean.

Another difference is that CDI actually injects proxies delegating to the current i

answered 2010-12-03T16:36:12.623
66

CDI is preferred over plain JSF because CDI allows for JavaEE-wide dependency injection. You can also inject POJOs and let them be managed. With JSF you can only inject a subset of what you can with CDI.

answered 2010-12-03T16:36:45.717

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