We've barely scratched the surface of portable extensions in this chapter, as there are an enormous number of things that can be achieved when utilizing the CDI container lifecycle. So many, in fact, that this is one of those rare situations where your imagination is more likely to be an inhibiting factor, and not the available SPI of CDI.
We explained what a portable extension is and what is required of us in developing one and having Weld recognize it. We briefly went through the CDI container lifecycle, discussing the events that are fired by Weld at each phase, while providing some ideas about what can be done as part of each event. We looked at the BeanManager, a core part of any extension developer's toolkit, before we learned how to perform injection into an instance that is not managed by Weld. Then we showed how a new bean can be created and registered with Weld using the Bean interface.
At the end of the chapter, we showed a complete example of an extension that took an existing...