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The XDoclet family (\[http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net/xdoclet/index.html XDoclet\] and \[http://xdoclet.codehaus.org XDoclet2\]) are generation engines used for attribute oriented programming. They process meta data (in the form of javadocs tags).

The interest for Betwixt is that java doc tags are a very nice way to mark up mappings.

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Design Ideas

As XDoclet developer I would suggest to go for new xdoclet-2 plugin, due to easiness of development and possibility of test coverage. Plugin development for xdoclet-2 is simplier than for old xdoclet 1.2.x

To develop a plugin you will need to chekout \[http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/xdoclet-plugins/ xdoclet-plugins\] from sourceforge. This is a maven reactor project, and you can easily add new subdirectory and use other  plugins as templates. I would suggest to use  some of jelly-based plugins as base ( for example plugin-hibernate ) as betwixt plugin vill be producing xml documents.

XDoclet-2 plugins shall compile without any problem ( assumed you got ejb-2.1.jar in your maven repository).  After you are done, I'm happy to take your changes and commit them to plugins repository.  put 'em into \[http://jira.codehaus.org/secure/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10231 JIRA\]

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Developing plugin & tags

Some quick suggestions to plugin development process.

• Base package shall be form org.xdoclet.plugin.betwixt
• Interfaces decalring tags shall go into: org.xdoclet.plugin.betwixt.qtags
• those interfaces shall be marked up by @qtags.something tags to be really validatable
• do not forget to write tests. support classes are provided, and you can see their usage
• in other modules
  
  

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