A P P E N D I X   C  

Appendix 

C 

17. Appendix 

C 

Introduction to XDoclet 

Have you ever thought that creating and maintaining the Home and Remote interface, the 

deployment descriptors, Value Objects etc. is a pain. Also did Rickard Oeberg, architect of 

JBoss 2, and created EJBDoclet that was renamed afterwards to XDoclet because it does 

generated EJB files but also web, JMX etc files. 

XDoclet, as the name implies, is a special JavaDoc doclet implementation and reads 

JavaDoc comments and uses this and class information to generated other Java source code, 

deployment descriptors and other files. The basic idea behind is that all the redundant 

information in these additional classes are generated to speed up project development and 

shorten testing because you don't have to worry about Java classes out of sync or wrong 

references in or between deployment descriptors. Finally and maybe the most important fact 

is that all the information are in one, central Java class. No jumping around to figure out 

the JNDI name, the datasource name, resource name etc. and also only one file is added to a 

version control tool like CVS because all the other files are generated every time necessary. 

XDoclet is heavily incorporate into ANT build system (see Appendix B) and therefore you 

must run XDoclet as an ANT task. To use XDoclet you have to: 

Create a  Taskdef  in the ANT build file before you can use XDoclet 

Write the XDoclet task, specify the task attributes and the file set (list of Java classes 

inspected by XDoclet) 

Write the XDoclet subtask and specify its attributes 

Finally a list of advanced features of XDoclet: 

Able to merge in pieces of code, XML snippets etc. at specific merge points 

Able to change the layout files XDoclet uses to generate the files and use them 

without changing XDoclet 

A GUI tool to write XDoclet definitions (XDocletGUI) 

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