I just spent 2 hours getting the multiline tooltips to work.

Tooltips?

So why am I messing with tooltips, and with what? Because XDoclet GUI (which
I've secretly been working on for some time, Sorry guys) finally starts to
work the way I want. It's way cool. It uses the (now pretty soon stable)
xjavadoc engine to parse source code and displays tags in a gui. (See
tools.html in the XDoclet docs for an old screenshot). It also parses an xml
file and figures out what tags/tag parameters are appliccable to what
classes/methods. This is done by using a pretty nifty condition scheme I
"stole" from Ant. This GUI should be pretty useful to newbies I guess. We
can develop IDE plugins, and have a lot of fun.

In XDoclet GUI you can modify the tags (but only those that apply according
to the xml!) and save the source back to disk (anywhere you want). xjavadoc
does the doc mutation stuff. And yes - you have multiline tooltips over the
tag parameter names that explain what the parameters mean. (The text is from
the xml of course).

The idea is that the same xml will be used to generate docs using XSLT. (We
can even use FOP to create PDF docs if we want, in case somebody is crazy
enough to want to do that). This xml will have to be maintained by all tag
developers, and should eventually be in the xdoclet module. We can split up
the xml when it gets too big. I only defined the @ejb:bean tag. We can use
xml includes (DOCTYPE and & syntax) to do this transparently.

Finally the xml can also be used by xdoclet to validate tags. We can extend
the DTD to our needs.

As you might have spotted, there is a little "xtags" implementation in the
xdocletgui module. It is in a separate package, so we can move it over to
the xdoclet core when it's ok. -But there is also Konstantin's stuff. When
he adds his code to CVS, we'll be able to compare and get the best out of
the two.

In order to try XDoclet GUI you must:
1) check out the xjavadoc module next to your xdoclet CVS module.
2) build junit-report (this will build the jar, and generate a nice report
under build/reports/html)
3) check out the xdocletgui module next to your xdoclet and xjavadoc CVS
modules.
4) build (This will compile and fire up XDoclet GUI which will show the
sample source code in XDoclet)
5) drag out the window a bit, I didn't bother to make it show bigger.
6) Try to modify the tag parameters of classes and methods (not much on
methods yet thouh).
7) Try to save the sources to some directory. It will be written out with
the new/modified tags. Check it!
8) And not to forget - move your mouse over a tag parameter label. Sigh.

There is a bug: If you modify a combo value, step to a different tree node
and back, the combo is reset. Blah. There is a lot of small things to fix.
I'll mention them later.

I hope I haven't stepped on any feet by going a bit ego on this. I've been
seeing the light with this stuff. I hope you see it too ;-)

Awaiting your comments,
Aslak


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