Arjan,
I think better defined integration between servlets and CDI is highly desirable.
However, there is still a really vague area of the difference between webapps that bundle their own version of CDI and expect to be able to use that internally, vs a CDI implementation provided by the container. This really needs to be sorted out and clarified as dealing with multiple versions of the CDI API is a bit of a nightmare (especially with JPMS).
So if we are to continue to allow webapps to bundle CDI within themselves, should we really be looking at adding something to the Servlet spec to allow arbitrary decoration of container managed instances by entities on either in the container and/or in the webapp.
This mechanism could then be instantiated by CDI implementations and thus decorate Listeners/Filters/Servlets.
Or maybe CDI is this mechanism, but then it really needs to sort out how to handle the difference between in webapp and in container injection. Specifically different versions of CDI.
Finally, we need to ensure that CDI decoration is specified either as something to initialize instances before they are configured by descriptors/fragments/annotations/listeners; or as overrides that apply after instances are configured by descriptors/fragments/annotations/listeners. Sorting out the precedence amongst these configuration sources is already a nightmare, having an additional one in the mix will not be good... especially for anything that tries to make an effective-web.xml to fast start a webapp without scanning. CDI injection needs to be applied before or after an effective-web.xml... never during!
cheers
