techno.blog("Dion")

Cedric has been a busy guy :) He just launched SGen, which looks like a next generation of his EJBGen…. well a super-set for sure.

The cool part of it is that it works on both JavaDoc tags, and the new JSR 175 Metadata anotations. Since Cedric was on the expert group for 175 I was hoping something cool would come out from him.

SGen is very generic, and lets you write your own modules to do whatever you want with the metadata. I like how proud people are to say “you don’t need to use XML!”. First Bob with dynaop, and now SGen.

What I want to know is… when will Groovy be built-in. It would be cool to write modules in Groooovy :)

I liked EJBGen when it first came out, and even wrote an article about it. Now there is XDoclet, it is hard to choose between the two.

A pro for EJBGen is that it is kept up to date with WLS, and is even built-in and really supported by BEA now. If you use WLS then you would be happy about that.

A pro for XDoclet is that you can use it to generate your web based deployment descriptors, your hibernate config, and your kitchen sink. If you wanted to generate all of that stuff, then you probably wouldn’t want to use both EJBGen and XDoclet.

Now Cedric has gotten SGen out there, people could write modules for it to generate all of “that stuff” too. Of course, it is early days. In my experience the toughest part of these code gen frameworks is having people to keep the support up to date. It is really annoying to have to wait on an upgrade because the generator isn’t ready to gen the latest versions of the config files. At least with open source you can write your own though!

I can’t wait to read all of the “Cedric why didn’t you just help on XDoclet 2″ talk :)

SGen home page