Was wondering if anyone has developed an xDoclet tag system that will somehow map/display class methods back to the requirements that drove the creation of those methods? If so please let me know,
Maybe I am wrong at the xdoclet-mailinglist for that idea:
Did you thought of MDD (ModelDriven Development)? We use it since about 1.5 years and are quite excited!
You do the modelling, which is also the documentation in your own DSL (Domain Specific Language). Most times it is a dialect of UML called UML-Profile. But you can also use XML, Visio, simple TXT-Files... What ever you want just it has to be an abstraction of the sources (i.e. EJB, Hibernate)
Just describe Services and Entities. The technical stuff will be generated!
The best way is to develop your own DSL and your own architecture description in form of templates. But you can also use distributed architectures shipped with the generator.
There are several products available. We use the OpenSource-Framework "AndroMDA" [1] for generation (it uses also xDoclet). But there are also a lot of different other tools: openarchitectureware (OpenSource, [2]), ArcStyler (ClosedSource, Community Edition, [3] and many others.
Back to your point: We do the documentation of business-methods in the UML modell. From there it is generated to the JavaDoc-Comments in the source code of the Service-Interface. Also we generate a ModelDocumentation in HTML. The next step is to generate XML-FO, so we can transform it to every output we want to (HTML for Developers, RTF for projectmanagement, PDF for Customers). And we have the UML-Model for the Designers.
I think, thats the way documentation should come into. I'd like to go the way to model the requirements in UML with documentation and perhaps Visio and then generate the requirements specification document from that model and also about 90% of the source code (which we can do already).
If you have a look at AndroMDA, you will see, they ship already templates for EJB, Hibernate, Struts and some others. I think you could get into it quite easy.
Don't get it wrong: MDD is not the solution for everyone. But I think it is a solution for a lot of projects. You need not to write the same code again and again and again - EJB has a lot of it. You also need to write the same xDoclet-Tags again and again and again. Just let the computer do this work. concentrate to the really exciting work: the business code. The Code which is really important to your project. For the customer it doesn't matter, if you use EJB or Hibernate. He doesn't care, if you have SessionFacades. He just wants to have a running system. So why should you run into risks of errors in the technical infrastructure?
I think a lot of you already did the step to start minimizing the risks of technical infrastructure by using xDoclet. The next step is MDD. ;)
Oh my god. Just I read my mail again. I think its something like an advertisement for MDD. But I am really impressed by MDD. We are about 4 times more productive than using "hand coding" before. And the quality of our source code is a lot better than before. The computer does the copy'n'paste-work for us and he makes no mistakes!
So... think about it! It really great...
MArtin
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