XDoclet is an open source code generation engine. It enables Attribute-Oriented Programming for java. In short, this means that you can add more significance to your code by adding meta data (attributes) to your java sources. This is done in special JavaDoc tags. XDoclet will parse your source files and generate many artifacts such as XML descriptors and/or source code from it. These files are generated from templates that use the information provided in the source code and its JavaDoc tags. XDoclet lets you apply Continuous Integration in component-oriented development. Developers should concentrate their editing work on only one Java source file per component. This approach has several benefits: You don’t have to worry about out dating deployment meta-data whenever you touch the code. The deployment meta-data is continuously integrated. Working with only one file per component gives you a better overview of what you’re doing. If your component consists of several files, it’s easy to lose track. If you have ever written an Enterprise Java Bean, you know what we mean. A single EJB can typically consists of 7 or more files. With XDoclet you only maintain one of them, and the rest is generated. You dramatically reduce development time, and can concentrate on business logic, while XDoclet generates 85% of the code for you. Currently XDoclet can only be used as part of the build process utilizing Jakarta Ant. Although XDoclet originated as a tool for creating EJBs, it has evolved into a general-purpose code generation engine. XDoclet consists of a core and a constantly growing number of modules. It is fairly straightforward to write new modules if there is a need for a new kind of component. XDoclet comes with a set of modules for generation of different kinds of files. Users and contributors can write their own modules (or modify existing ones) if they wish to extend the functionality of XDoclet.
