What to do if @PostConstruct is not called for JSF managed beans?

I have read and faced self the problem that methods annotated with @PostConstruct / @PreDestroy get never called. Even in JEE 6 compliant servers (weird). This problem had e.g. Tomcat in early 6.x releases, Jetty 6.1.x, etc. Jetty 6.1.x maven plugin can not be used than during development.

There is a simple solution when using Mojarra JSF. Well, if you use Spring framework, you probably don't have this problem. This post provides a solution for JSF projects without Spring (because it doesn't make sense to use Spring in small, lightweight projects). Since Mojarra 1.2 there is a context parameter for web.xml com.sun.faces.injectionProvider. This parameter specifies a class that implements the InjectionProvider SPI. This implementation represents a hook the JSF implementation will use to provide resource injection support. If no provider, shipped with application server, was found and @PostConstruct / @PreDestroy are not called, we can set the value for this context parameter to com.sun.faces.vendor.WebContainerInjectionProvider as follows

<context-param>
    <param-name>com.sun.faces.injectionProvider</param-name>
    <param-value>
        com.sun.faces.vendor.WebContainerInjectionProvider
    </param-value>
</context-param>

Annotations will be parsed and annotated methods invoked now and you will see a message during application startup.

...
02.05.2011 16:04:13 com.sun.faces.spi.InjectionProviderFactory createInstance
INFO: JSF1048: PostConstruct/PreDestroy-Annotationen available. ...
...

It's also possible to use the JBoss implementaion org.jboss.web.jsf.integration.injection.JBossInjectionProvider. I have never tested it, but I think it would be a proper alternative.

<context-param>
    <param-name>com.sun.faces.injectionProvider</param-name>
    <param-value>
        org.jboss.web.jsf.integration.injection.JBossInjectionProvider
    </param-value>
</context-param>

JBoss 5 and above uses it automatically, so that no needs exist for the mentioned parameter.