I found this post on the castor-dev mailing list this afternoon. It seems to indicate that there's a better version of the Castor module for XDoclet.
The "exolab2" module is nearly identical to the original exolab module in
that it:
1. generates the mapping.xml file
however, exolab2 differs in that it:
1. works on the fields in a class instead of the methods
-working with field name seems easier and more logical as castor
is for mapping class/db fields, not methods
2. generates the database.xml file
3. generates the create.sql and drop.sql for each class' table
4. doesn't require explicitly declaring the @castor:field-sql type="..." for each class field;
it uses a simple look up .xml file to retrieve the
appropriate/default sql type for
the field's java type
5. doesn't require explicitly declaring the @castor:class table="...";
the class' name will be used as the default table name
so in summary, it generates:
-database.xml
-mapping.xml
-create.sql
-drop.sql
with less "work" than before. basically, these improvements are to help
developers quickly and easily generate all the castor-specific and
non-castor-specific (sql table defintions) code for new projects.
Too bad this isn't available in XDoclet as of yet. Hmmm, maybe I can use Castor Doclet to generate my DDL.
Graham Glass offers some great suggestions on how he writes a book (tip of the hat to Matt Croydon). This is extremely valuable information for me, as I will be writing a couple chapters over the next few weeks. If I can follow in his footsteps, I'll be set!
A typical chapter takes me 3 or 4 days to write, including the source code for the examples, which I think is pretty fast. In addition, the high level book structure takes about a day.
The thing I'm struggling with right now is what persistence layer to use on my example Struts application. I'd like to use either Hibernate or Castor, but since I've never implemented either from scratch, I don't want to spend more time learning than implementing. And I'd like to generate the entire persistence layer - which seems possible with both. I'd like to use Middlegen, but then I'll have to use JDO or EJB's for my persistence layer. While JDO might be appropriate, EJBs are probably over-kill for an example app. The nice thing about Middlegen is that it will generate the JSP and Struts classes for me too.
