To jump into this discussion at a non-linear place, another useful addition to the jdee would be the ability to add custom javadoc tags for xdoclet. Xdoclet comes with a java gui tool for this (xdocletgui) which modifies the source files. It would be considerably easier to use in emacs if the functionality was directly available.
The rules for which tags are allowed when using a particular module are contained in xml files. Typically the conditions involve what kind of item you are commenting (class, method, or field, sometimes whether it is a getter/setter) and what other tags are present. I think in order to do this in elisp one would need an xml parser and a parsed version of the java file indicating what kind of element you are at and what javadoc tags are already present. So far I haven't tried doing any lisp programming (since about 1968) so I have no idea how practical this would be. Any advice? Thanks david jencks