CDI - what is the correct bean.xml format?

Question

I have a question about the correct format and usage of the bean.xml file. In my projects I typically used this content for my bean.xml files (no explizit bean declaration used):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
      http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee 
      http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_0.xsd">
</beans>

This works well in WildFly 8 and 9. But I have deployment issues in GlassFish 4. In the question: Glassfish 4, simple example in CDI fails with WELD-001408 Unsatisfied dependencies I wrote about an alternative format:

<beans
   xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee 
                  http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_1.xsd"
          bean-discovery-mode="all">
</beans>

There a different namespaces used. And GlassFish4 seems to care about that.

What is the correct format of an empty bean.xml File used for JEE7 ?

Wording

Answer 1

Correct empty beans.xml can be totally empty file, really ;-)

But when you want to add some content, please notice that most of the XML deployment descriptor namespaces have been updated in Java EE 7. This post describes the details. Also bean-discovery-mode has been added.

BTW: Sample beans.xml which I'm using right now looks like:

<beans xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/beans_1_1.xsd"
       version="1.2" bean-discovery-mode="annotated">

    <!-- some content -->
</beans>

You may notice the usage of version="1.2" attribute - you can freely set it to 1.1. It just serves as a reminder to the reader that project is using CDI 1.2 (which in fact is just a Maintenance release of the CDI 1.1 Specification).

Steinman

stricly speaking, IMHO, that is not totally empty: there a single bit of information in the bean-discovery-mode="annotated" attribute. I guess they could have done better getting rid of it, and defaulting to "all", IMHO again. – Fancyfree