While I certainly appreciate the idea of aligning more Jakarta EE specifications to CDI, who would really be the target audience for a CDI based Servlet component model? Wouldn't this audience in practice have a lot of overlap with JAX-RS users? If so, is this an effort worth undertaking? Maybe this is something best pursued as an experimental framework to see what the uptake would be instead of work done in Jakarta?
I'm certainly willing to attempt it as an experimental framework first. You're right that there's a bit of an overlap with JAX-RS, though that has always been the case to some degree.
The audience would essentially be people taking advantage of all the traditional use cases for Servlet; handling requests which are not essentially restful in nature, and serving data accordingly. The added value would the extra flexibility to apply interceptors and scopes. Meaning that one can install e.g. an HTTPAuthenticationMechanism, and apply the more advanced security interceptor that we're planning for Jakarta Security 3.
It's for that reason I proposed not adding any fancy features. It are Servlets, but re-imagined as beans.
Another, perhaps even more important reason for this is to have a place to put the CDI based producers (Bean<T>s really), which are now in CDI core, to inject instances like the current HttpServletRequest. Those are in need of some overhaul (e.g, it's not at all defined which *current* HTTPServletRequest is injected, think original, vs wrapped, vs one after an include or forward etc). The CDI spec has indicated those things never belonged in CDI. CDI is to be used as a foundation for other specs, not as a Facade for Servlet and others.
Now we attempted to move these things to Servlet, but that failed. Jetty is not specifically interested in CDI (reiterated here above), and that's what it is. It's their right to have that opinion. We discussed it before, had different opinions, but eventually resolved the discussion.
So instead of repeating all those discussions, this new (small) CDI sub-spec / related standalone spec could conveniently contain all the CDI producers for Servlet types, and perhaps (if there's interest) CDI versions of Servlet events.
Personally I think it is important to try to align JAX-RS and Servlet if it is not too late to do so.
JAX-RS seems unfortunately not interested in re-basing on full Servlet, even though in practice nearly all JAX-RS implementations are Servlet based. The core HTTP library discussed here should be able to stand a chance though, and that would be a good step.
A related area to perhaps think about is making Servlet more Reactive. Although even in this space I am not sure what the practical uptake has been, if there has been sufficient maturity and what the impact of Project Loom will be.
What is slam dunk for me is working on the existing backlog of more minor enhancements including keeping track of HTTP/3.
Yes, indeed.