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About the author

Rick Hightower

is a developer who enjoys working with Java programming language,

Ant and XDoclet. Rick is currently the CTO of

Trivera Technologies

, a global training,

mentoring and consulting company focusing on enterprise development.

If you like this tutorial, you might like Rick s book

Java Tools for Extreme Programming

,

which was the best selling software development book on Amazon for three months in

2002.

Rick also contributed two chapters to the book Mastering Tomcat on the subjects Struts

Tutorial, and Tomcat development with Ant and XDoclet as well as many other

publications.

Rick is also speaking this year (2003) at JavaOne on EJB CMP/CMR and XDoclet and

at TheServerSide.com Software Symposium on J2EE development with XDoclet. Rick

has spoken at JDJEdge, WebServicesEdge and the Complete Programmer Network

software symposiums.

Tools you will need for this tutorial

You will need a current version of the JDK. All the examples in this tutorial use J2SE

SDK 1.4.1.

All of the examples use Ant build scripts to build and deploy the Web applications that

contain the examples. This should be no surprise since XDoclet relies on Ant, and the

only interface to XDoclet is through Ant. Ant can be found at the

Ant home page

. The

examples use Ant 1.5.3.

You will, of course, need XDoclet itself which can be found at the

XDoclet site

. XDoclet

like Ant is open source. The examples in this tutorial use version XDoclet 1.2 beta 2.

Not only is it likely that XDoclet will be out of beta by the time you read this, but XDoclet

has been recently accepted to be a Apache Jakarta project so if you do not find it at the

above link look for it at the

Apache Jakarta site

.

I recommend that you use an Integrated development environment (IDE) such as

available from the Eclipse project, since there are quite a few jar files to manage. All

the examples ship with the projects done in the freely available Eclipse IDE and are

compatible with Eclipse and WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WebSphere

Studio). As long as you configure you environment as suggested you can use the

Eclipse project files with little additional work. Eclipse or WebSphere Studio Application

Developer (WebSphere Studio) is not required, but can be found at the

Eclipse Web

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Enhance J2EE component reuse with XDoclets