Originally posted by Ashok C.M.:
Craig/Norman
Can you tell me how XDoclet can be used from within eclipse?
I don't currently use the JBoss-IDE plugin. Not because it sucks--on the contrary, what I've seen of it is pretty cool. I had it installed on my old notebook, but before I got into it I got a new notebook and haven't taken the time to set it up there. But, from what I see of it, I recommend it...in fact, I may make time to set it up on the new machine later today.
But, here's how I use XDoclet with Eclipse...it's not necessarily the best way, but it's the way I've gotten used to.
My projects have two source directories--src and gensrc--and one additional "generated" directory. The "clean" target in my build never blows away the gensrc directory itself...instead it just empties that directory. The reason for this is that if "gensrc" were to suddenly disappear and Eclipse found out about it, after it would be recreated, it wouldn't be considered a source directory anymore. So...just to keep Eclipse happy, I don't touch gensrc itself, but just clean out stuff inside of it.
With that setup, everything else is fairly straightforward. My main source code is in src, my generated
Java code goes to gensrc, and anything else that's generated (deployment descriptors, for example) goes to the "generated" directory. After I run
Ant, I refresh my project to sync it up with the filesystem and I keep on truckin'.
That's roughly the setup you'll see in the example code for the book. But, I'm starting to switch gears lately and either use Maven. Or, even if I'm using Ant, I try to keep the same directory structure that Maven imposes by default. Specifically, I have a source/java directory that houses all of my Java code and I have a target/source/java directory where all of my generated code goes. Part of the build will copy everything from source/java to target/source/java and compile all source code from there.
Of course...now I've strayed away from how this all ties in with Eclipse. Really, none of what I do in my build is specific for Eclipse except for keeping my gensrc directory hanging around. This probably doesn't help you much, but since I use Eclipse, I thought I'd share my experiences with you. I'll probably install the plugin later today and see how that goes.
