(XDoclet)Template tags ? for the Authors.

[Mcgill Smith]

Hi,

How hard is the learning curve for XDoclet specially the template tags? Are these tags covered in detail in your book? Secondly are, the tag namespaces (XDtClass,XDtMethod) something like JSP taglibs?
Is working knowledge of ANT enough to learn XDoclet? Or does one have to be an advanced ANT user.
Thanks in advance.

[Lasse Koskela]

Working knowledge of Ant is enough. I would say the biggest learning curve is to get fast enough in typing in those javadoc tags (i.e. get fast enough in browsing the XDoclet tag reference ).

[norman richards]

I think an intermediate ant user should have no problem integrating XDoclet into an ant build system. (a true beginner would probably want to cut and paste from an existing XDoclet
build.xml)
Yes, the template tags do work somewhat like JSP tag libraries. There definitely is a learning curve for the XDoclet template tags you use when creating a custom XDoclet generation task. Honestly, it took me quite some time before I was truly comfortable writing custom templates. I hope we've knocked the learning time down considerably with our explanations in the book, but ultimately custom generation will still requires some effort. We do go through the most common tags in chapter 12 and document everything in the appendices.

[Mcgill Smith]

Thanks Norman and Lasse.

Just installed XDoclet and followed Norman�s advice
(a true beginner would probably want to cut and paste from an existing XDoclet
build.xml)

It WORKED!!
Magic!

[Pradeep bhatt]

I dunno Ant..Does it mean I cant learn XDoclet?

[Mcgill Smith]

quote : Pradeep
I dunno Ant..Does it mean I cant learn XDoclet?
---------------------------------------------
Hi Pradeep,
Learning the basic's of ANT are not very difficult.
[ December 09, 2003: Message edited by: Mcgill smith ]

[Lasse Koskela]

Originally posted by Pradeep Bhat:
I dunno Ant..Does it mean I cant learn XDoclet?

You really should take a look at Ant. It's not too difficult to get started and it's being used *everywhere*.

[norman richards]

Originally posted by Mcgill smith:
Thanks Norman and Lasse.

Just installed XDoclet and followed Norman�s advice
(a true beginner would probably want to cut and paste from an existing XDoclet
build.xml)

It WORKED!!
Magic!

Hooray!
The biggest challenge is getting started. The code samples from the book at the manning site should be helpful there, but there are other examples on the net. I also mentioned Xcode in another topic. If you are doing J2EE (web or EJB) xcode will give you a complete Ant build file with XDoclet already integrated. It will set you up with some stub merge files that you can use and will generate sample servlets/beans for to demonstrate the tags.
Oh, and it will deploy straight to the built-in JBoss for you.
I can't think of a simpler way to get started...