Ant: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Using XDoclet

XDoclet is an open source code generation engine designed for use with Ant, and you can pick it up for free at http://xdoclet.sourceforge.net/. It'll write code for you, especially deployment descriptors, and is often used for Web and EJB development. XDoclet comes with a number of Ant tasks built-in, shown in Table 9-9.

Table 9-9. The XDoclet Ant tasks

Ant task	Does this
doclet	Specifies the base class for all XDoclet Ant tasks
ejbdoclet	Specifies which EJB-specific subtasks to execute
hibernatedoclet	Specifies which Hibernate subtasks to execute
jdodoclet	Specifies which JDO-specific subtasks to execute
jmxdoclet	Specifies which JMX-specific subtasks to execute
mockdoclet	Generates mock doclet objects
portletdoclet	Specifies which portlet-specific subtasks to execute
webdoclet	Specifies which Web-specific subtasks to execute

XDoclet lets you generate code and deployment descriptors by embedding tags in your code, much like the tags you'd use for Javadoc. There are entire books written about XDoclet because it's an extensive tool. Though there's not room for that level of coverage herethis is a book about Ant, not XDocletI'll take a look at several examples creating Web and EJB applications here, giving the XDoclet story from Ant's point of view.

Developing Applications

You use the XDoclet webdoclet task to develop Web applications. The attributes of this task appear in Table 9-10, and the possible nested elements in Table 9-11.

Table 9-10. The webdoclet Ant tasks ...