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20030612 Thursday June 12, 2003

Is XDoclet the best thing since Ant? I think XDoclet is the best thing since Ant but that's probably because I use it daily (and nightly on on other projects). If you're not using XDoclet now, chances are you soon will be - and then you'll wonder - What took me so long? Calvin Yu gives his take on JSR 175.

I'm very excited about the new Metadata feature that's going to be in 1.5. I'm usually in agreement with the view that adding new language features is just making Java more complex, but I think metadata is going to put a whole new emphasis in automating repetitive tasks. This should also bring xDoclet to the forefront as a necessary tool for Java development.

(emphasis mine) Let's just hope that Sun tries to use some of the goodness that the XDoclet team has put together. XDoclet rocks - if you don't believe me, you must like editing your web.xml and struts-config.xml (among other deployment descriptors) by hand. I did that for years - and my opinion is that using XDoclet is easier. Posted in Java at Jun 12 2003, 10:41:22 AM MDT 1 Comment

Comments:

XDoclet, like ANT, come close to the mark of usefullness, but end up missing entirely. XDoclet doesn't save you any typing. It junks up your java files and makes yet another list of magic strings you have to know to use it. What is so great about typing deployment information in the javadoc instead of an XML file? For example, with Stateless Session EJBs, what you want to be able to do is write ONE class, and have the app server deploy that as a bean, using sensible defaults for JNDI names, class names, deployment options. 9 times out of 10, you go with the defaults or a best-practice anyway. Then, if you don't like the defaults, specify what you need in your XML descriptor. Now THAT would be useful.

Posted by Dave on June 12, 2003 at 02:35 PM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architect who enjoys developing applications with open source technologies. Contact me for rates.
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