Thanks Brian for your reply, I got your point. I wasn't definitely going to
ask here questions related to XDoclet tags or strategies (I posted those to
the XDoclet list). However, it's a fact that JBoss is a succesfull
application server, and as an application server, it interacts with lots of
technologies. Just to name a few:

Tomcat,
Database (here we open scenarios like Oracle, MySQL, SQLServer, postgresql,
etc.),
XDoclet
Ant

I think that Jboss, as a J2EE application server, cannot unbind itself from
those technologies, and those technologies, being part of the open source
family, and layers in the J2EE architecture, to be succesfull want to give
support for  any succesfull product (here included Jboss).

>From this, I would say *natural*, relationship between J2EE layers products
and *containers*, often it arises for the J2EE developer the opportunity to
use those technologies together (also with the high risk that one technology
will in a future stop from giving support to the other!) . So the same
question I made for XDoclet could be valid for Oracle or MySQL, or Ant for
the part of those technologies which offer, or has been offered, support
for.

Hope to haven't bothered you with my argumentations,

Regards,

Marco
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Topping" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2003 4:37 PM
Subject: RE: [JBoss-user] Jboss and Xdoclet


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Marco Tedone [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: [JBoss-user] Jboss and Xdoclet
>
> Can I ask question related to Jboss on xdoclet tasks on this list?

Marco,

You can ask here, but sometimes the best place to ask them is on the XDoclet
user list.  Here's why, with an important caveat at the end:

All XDoclet does is acts as a conduit between the information that is
already
contained in a class file plus the additional XDoclet tags and writes it to
the desired descriptor.  It saves you effort because things like the class
name don't need to be retyped, errors are avoided, working in teams is much
easier, etc.

But that's the important thing to realize about it... it's just a conduit.
Everything that it does requires that you understand the tags that you want
generated, and these tags are documented in dozens and dozens of places.
It's really easy to think that you can avoid learning descriptor file
semantics by just learning XDoclet, but it will only get you in a lot of
trouble and lead you to post questions that are not XDoclet questions but
questions that are easily answered in EJB textbooks.

It's like trying to learn integrals without a strong understanding of
intermediate math.  XDoclet really knows nothing about what you are asking
it
to do, cannot make suggestions or fix what you are doing wrong, it's
strictly
"garbage in, garbage out".

I'm suspect you already know all this (and my apologies if so), but it's
important to remember because most beginner problems with XDoclet use on
JBoss are often misunderstandings of the descriptor files and their
semantics, not a problem with XDoclet.  Conversely, if you understand the
descriptor files, XDoclet becomes trivially easy to use.  There are very few
things with it that are not obvious.

What most people do to solve their XDoclet problems is look at the
descriptors that are generated, figure out what they want different, then
decide what needs to be done in the source to make that happen, usually by
adding a new tag of one form or another.  But realize that they know what
they want in to happen in the descriptor files, so picking a tag to use
becomes easy, and as you might surmise, isn't really a question any more
about XDoclet, it's about EJB (or whatever doclet task you have in mind).

And so when I say you should post to XDoclet, it's because now that you
understand how it works, you should never have to post something unless
there
is a problem getting a tag that you put in your source to do what you think
it should do... because you *know* what it is you want, you know if you
generate the descriptor by hand that JBoss does what you want, and you are
reduced to simply having problems getting it to do that.

See what I mean?  I'm definitely not sending you to the XDoclet list to ask
a
lot of tag questions, more that the only time you ever need to ask questions
about XDoclet is when you don't understand why the descriptors that are
generated are not matching what you think they should be generating.  In the
end, it's really best to ask questions about JBoss with the generated
descriptors (even if you are using XDoclet for descriptor generation),
because they somewhat obscure the question in a shorthand that not everyone
can use.

Hope that helps.  Have fun with it!!

-b


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