Replacing com.google.inject with javax.inject

Question

Is it true that javax.inject annotations can function as direct replacements for com.google.inject?

So that, if I replaced all my current guice/gin annotations with those from javax.inject, my app would compile and run just fine?

First, does javax.inject cover all the bases that google.inject cover?

Answer 1

Yes, it will work fine. In fact the author of guice (Bob Lee) is a spec-lead for the javax.inject specification.

javax.inject.Inject does not have the optional attribute, so if you want an optional dependency, you'd have to use the guice annotation.

Answer 2

Actually, I have chosen to refrain from switching to javax.inject, because I find the spec much minimalistic in comparison to what Guice provides (which I use):

• @Optional as mentioned by @Bozho
• @ImplementedBy which is very useful when you want to reduce the number of explicit bindings (for code clarity) and when you want to be able to easily override the default @ImplementedBy binding if you need (e.g. for integration tests).

There are probably others but for me these 2 are showstoppers already.

Answer 3

See JSR-330 Integration on Guice's site.

Answer 4

The question is quite old but... FYI: you can automatically check that on apiwave.

By learning with past changes we see that com.google.inject.Inject can be replaced by javax.inject.Inject.