XDoclet Integration

The XDoclet family (XDoclet and 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.

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 JIRA

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 @qtag.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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