Netbeans, Ant and XDoclet

Today, I played around with getting NetBeans 4.0 Beta 2, Ant 1.6.2 and XDoclet 1.2.2 to talk together and play nice. (NB 4.2b2 comes w/Ant 1.6.2 built in; XDoclet is separate.) The goal was to get JBoss into the mix as well, but that'll probably have to wait until tomorrow.

I created a simple project (Hello, from the Mastering EJB 2.0 book). NB shows the build.xml file under the Files tab (and not on the Project tab, where I was first looking for it). build.xml expands to show all targets; most of the targets live under nbproject/build-impl.xml, and several are empty and can be overridden in build.xml. (The overridables are listed in a comment.)

For background, Ant build files set up chains of dependent targets. NB's default is default, which depends on dist and javadoc. dist in turn depends on init, compile, pre-dist, do-dist and post-dist, which it most likely runs in that order; each of these depend on others, and so on.

So I added various tags to my simple bean file. At the class level, I added an @ejb.bean tag, with name and type attrs. jndi-name and local-jndi-name attrs also look useful. I also added an @ejb.interface-method tag to my one business method.

In build.xml, I added an ejbdoclet target, with an embedded task of the same name, depending on init. The destdir attr looked most useful, and I added an excludedtags and verbose attr as well. I then added remoteinterface, localinterface, homeinterface and localhomeinterface elements (all empty), and a fileset that listed my one source file, explicitly.

I'm pretty sure there's a better way to list my source files. I tried **/*.java, but with my destdir putting the generated files into my source dir (which may be a problem), compiling a 2nd time gives me interfaces for my interfaces, which is wrong. So for the moment, I'm listing each file separately, and will be looking for a better way. Like having a "generated" directory that's separate, or something. Suggestions welcome.

Then I troubleshot it. First off, it couldn't find the ejbdoclet task. Played around with the compile classpath, to no avail. Found that I could add an Ant classpath element under the taskdef, but that felt unwieldy, especially as I had 5-6 jars eventually to add. Was about to separate it out as an Ant typedef, then thought that since Ant is a proper part of NB, there should be a config option. There was, under Tools/Options, Building, Ant Settings, Additional Classpath. Added several files there (xdoclet, xdoclet-ejb-module, xjavadoc, commons-logging and -collections, and jboss-j2ee.jar), and life was good.

I was also getting empty bean interfaces. Seems I forgot to put the @ejb.interface-method on the method, but adding the tag fixed that.

One thing made it slightly harder than it should have been. I had intended to start out with a very simple stateless session bean, and mimic xdoclet's sample. It turns out that xdoclet's sample stateless session bean was a sample of how *NOT* to let xdoclet generate the interfaces for you. Bad choice on my part. Ah well.