Java source parsing/generation libraries

[Marcin Moscicki]

I am writing a tool, which output is a set of java source classes (*.java files). Although I got a first version working, I found that code generation is not a piece of cake - especially if you allow to specify snippets to include in the input and have to assert everything will compile, and, ideally, print it according to a given source formatting policy. This calls for a full syntactic tree.

Do you now any libraries that would provide some or all of the following:
- java code model classes for syntactic tree, like Clazz, Instruction, For, Declaration, Variable, etc;
- methods for printing a given tree as source code to a stream;
- methods for parsing streams and building that model tree ?

Every IDE has to have implementations of the following, including open-source Eclipse, so I am half expecting it is already done and I could just use it after a resonable learning time.

Any experiences or ideas for futher investigation path?

Thanks,

[Jesper de Jong]

Eclipse indeed has this, ofcourse, in the JDT Core project.

JDT Core is the Java infrastructure of the Java IDE. It includes:

...

A Java Model that provides API for navigating the Java element tree. The Java element tree defines a Java centric view of a project. It surfaces elements like package fragments, compilation units, binary classes, types, methods, fields.

Maybe it's worth to take a closer look if this is something you really need to do.

You could also have a look at JavaCC, a Java parser generator. It includes a Java grammar as one of the examples (but only for Java 1.0 and 1.1...).

If you search a little with Google, you'll find some other things like this one: JParse (I have no idea how useful or complete this is).
[ August 02, 2006: Message edited by: Jesper Young ]