Walls and Richards, both experienced software developers, explain how to use XDoclet, a metadata-driven code generation engine for Java, using many short code examples, a full-scale J2EE example, and a simple web application that shows how to use XDoclet across multiple subsystems to build complete applications. After an introduction to basic concepts of code generation and XDoclet, the book covers using XDoclet with Enterprise Java and with other applications and extending XDoclet. Some familiarity with EJB concepts is assumed.

A guide to the new XDoclet development tool that eliminates programming busy work by automatically generating code and other deployment artifacts, this book enables developers who place metadata in a single source code file to use XDoclet to generate additional source code and other files that are required in a project. In addition to the typical uses of XDoclet in J2EE development, the uses of XDoclet with non-J2EE technologies such as JDO, Hibernate, JMX, SOAP, and MockObjects are also detailed. Information on how to extend XDoclet to generate practically any code a programmer is furnished.