The Java EE 6 Tutorial

Configuring a CDI Application

An application that uses CDI must have a file named beans.xml. The file can be completely empty (it has content only in certain limited situations), but it must be present. For a web application, the beans.xml file can be in either the WEB-INF directory or the WEB-INF/classes/META-INF directory. For EJB modules or JAR files, the beans.xml file must be in the META-INF directory.