> Therefore I am *proposing* a new mission for XDoclet 2:
> 
> "XDoclet 2 will provide a well-designed, well-tested, small and stable
> core
> with many options for plugin development. XDoclet 2 will also provide
> tools
> that can package plugins. (This will be ant scripts AND maven plugins,
so
> people can use whatever they please). XDoclet 2 will only maintain
plugins
> for which there is no natural maintainer. (We'll probably maintain the
> standard ejb-jar.xml and web.xml plugins, but not vendor-specific
plugins
> like jboss, weblogic, struts or hibernate). Tool vendors and open
source
> projects that wish to have XDoclet support for their product are
> encouraged
> to develop, maintain and distribute their own XDoclet 2 plugins. If
the
> tool
> vendors themselves don't want to or can't do this, we encourage
volunteers
> to form smaller, independent projects (for example on SourceForge)
where
> they can maintain specific XDoclet plugins. The XDoclet 2
documentation
> will
> have links to all known plugins where they can be downloaded
separately."

I'm all for it!

What really made XDoclet a success among all these code generation tools
is not the template language or the modules. The @tags are XDoclet's
biggest investment, plus the community. So I think the monopolist
approach of xdoclet 1.x has served well actually. It created a huge
community around it, made it such a rich tool. Now we've grown and we
can't bear more @tags and a more diverse community with more bugs and
requests. Yes, we need to split, like MS should split :-)

So there should be:
- An XDoclet SDK
- Some built-in and generally useful modules/tags. These tags should be
very well thought and documented like a spec (not that formal actually,
but you get the idea, no more hackerish style).
- A community site (like intellij.net) preferably a Wiki site where you
can advertise new modules, search for them or even download them
dynamically like Maven (or the forthcoming Rutor project).

The xdoclet2 cvs module can serve as the sdk, an xdoclet2-modules module
for all the built-in modules. And I think ejb support shouldn't be in
xdoclet2-modules at all! It needs a separate ejb-xdoclet project, you
know because of those entire valueobject/blabla dependent subtasks. It
needs a community of its own.

And I personally do want to only work on the core, plus any plugin I
might actually use.

Regarding Hani's devil's advocacy about support for different template
languages: I find it useful. Not because I hope 50% of modules would use
Velocity and 50% Jelly. No, I think it's a good thing because by trying
to be template language independent we would have a better design, a
more testable one. WebWork is a good example. Rickard made it view
independent, he used jsp before and now uses Velocity, though I guess a
90%+ majority use jsp. And that's not even important for WW too, but
look how the view independent approach makes testing webwork stuff way
easier than testing Struts. A little bit of abstraction is a good thing.
That said although I still couldn't find enough time to take an accurate
look at what Aslak has done but so far I think it's very well designed
and well implemented. We have discussed different strategies for well
over a year!

Ara.



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