Wizard of X

One difference I've noticed when I create my bean in the XPage rather than having the server manage it, is that a managed bean seems to be created only once, while loading it up in a DataContext seems to execute the constructor multiple times. If you have a somewhat slow bean, like say it is compiling report data, this can be a significant performance hit. In the example I'm working on today, generating report data took 246 seconds as a DataContext and 117 seconds as a managed bean.

For a long time, every time I wanted to create a controller or model bean, I wrote it and then added it to my managed beans in faces-config. But this can create a very bloated faces config, particularly when these beans are only used by a single XPage. Then I learned about dataContext.