Rocket Surgery

I’ve started a new (mostly) greenfield project recently and after two years of having to code in an existing application with a restrictive framework, I was eager to stretch my legs a bit and break out some of the good ol’ tools that made me so productive in previous gigs - XDoclet being one of them.

For those who don’t know, XDoclet is an open-source tool that lets you put special tags in your javadoc, which XDoclet finds in a post- or pre-compile step, and uses to generate more code, or configuration files, or whatever else you want to generate. Most frequently, XDoclet is used to generate deployment descriptors and helper classes to go with the most important classes of a system. Hibernate promotes (or at least, promoted) XDoclet as part of its suite of tools for easing configuration. Almost any book on Hibernate includes at least one chapter on using XDoclet to build your Hibernate configurations.
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