ibm.com/developerWorks

Presented by developerWorks, your source for great tutorials

Section 6. Summary

Summary

This tutorial showed J2EE developers how to use XDoclet to speed development by

showing three step by step tutorials for using XDoclet.

XDoclet enables simplified continuous integration, and refactoring with

component oriented development using attribute oriented programming. XDoclet

allows you to radically reduce development time, by generating deployment descriptors

and support code, allowing you to focus on application logic code.

You learned how to use XDoclet with Servlets, Custom Tags, and EJB Session and

Entity beans.

XDoclet generates these related support files by parsing your source files similar to the

way the JavaDoc engine parses your source to create JavaDoc documentation.

XDoclet, like JavaDoc, not only has access to these extra tags that you added, but also

access to the structure of your source. XDoclet applies this hierarchy tree of data and

context to templates. It uses all of this to generate what would otherwise be

monotonous support files.

XDoclet speeds development by being less verbose than corresponding deployment

descriptors, by keeping the source in sync with the deployment descriptors and support

files which enable refactoring, and lastly by generating a metric ton of support files; in

the case of EJB one source to five generated files is not uncommon.

Resources

If you are new to EJB technology:

Check out Brett McLaughlin s

EJB best practices column

on developerWorks Java

technology zone.

Take the first tutorial in a series of five on

Introduction to container managed

persistence and relationships

(example code uses XDoclet) by Rick Hightower

(

developerWorks

, March 2002)

The Developer s Guide to Understanding EJB 2.0 (gain deeper understanding of the

specification)

If you are new to Custom Tags:

JSP taglibs: Better usability by design

, by Noel J. Bergman (

developerWorks

,

December 2001)

Page 48 of 49

Enhance J2EE component reuse with XDoclets