[rest-dev] Deprecating @Context and Supporting CDI

[James Perkins <jperkins@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello All,

The deadline for a proposal for Jakarta EE 12 is coming up quickly, April 15th 2025. The EPIC for Jakarta REST 5.0 is https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/1158.

I'd like to propose we make an attempt to resolve the issue of deprecating @Context and supporting CDI.

We currently have the following issues associated with this:

• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/569
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/749
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/951
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/952
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/953
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/1137
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/1155
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/1195
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/1206
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/1209
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/1214
• https://github.com/jakartaee/rest/issues/1215

The first step seems to be consolidating these.

My proposal is that we add @Deprecated(forRemoval = true) to the @Context annotation. We should probably also deprecate the ContextResolver as that can be replaced by a CDI producer.

For the client, I think we should just be explicit in the specification that if a client is running within a CDI container, that CDI will be supported. If it's outside a CDI container, it will not be. The question there becomes, how do we support injection for resources which @Context injection previously worked on. We could just say, it no longer supports it and you need to boot a CDI container if you want that. Or, potentially, there is a way to say we support Jakarta Injection and allow @Inject to effectively replace @Context.

What do you all think? In my opinion it feels critical to get this moving for Jakarta EE 12.

James R. Perkins

Principal Software Engineer

Red Hat