XDoclet Integration

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.

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]

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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