I would like to see the following:
(1) Better Ant Integration.
It would quite helpful if the ant task only ran XJC if the schema had
changed and cleaned up any left overs. As was mentioned on the list this
could be tricky. If a new version of schema no longer contains an element
that used to produce a java class, the class is left behind and needs to be
manually cleaned up. To work around this issue, we have adopted the
convention that all jaxb generated code for a component goes into its own
package/directory. Before we invoke JAXB from Ant from eclipse, we simply
delete the contents of the whole package/directory from ant, including any
subdirs. Pretty brutal but it is guaranteed not to leave old unused classes
behind.
I am not sure if asking for the following feature of jaxb is worth it. Tell
jaxb that *it* can manage a given directory as it sees fit when generating
code. This would allow Jaxb to delete everything before a generate or to be
smart and delete things selectively, or to generate/overwrite things
selectively. I just see the potential for so many bugs when doing deletes
and generates selectively that the delete manually approach is the simplest
way to go. Am I looking at this right?
(2) Eclipse integration.
At least provide documentation for the ant task. In Eclipse 2.1.M3, you need
to override the eclipse Xerces jars with the latest Xerces jars in order to
invoke jaxb from ant from eclipse. You also need to make sure that your
eclipse version ships ant 1.5.1 which 2.1.M3 does, that you need to point
eclipse to ant 1.5.1.
Gary
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Kincaid [mailto:Tom.Kincaid_at_sun.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 11, 2002 9:14 PM
To: JAXB-INTEREST_at_JAVA.SUN.COM
Subject: What would you like to see in tools.
Hi,
My name is Tom Kincaid. I am the development manager for JAXB. I would
be interested in hearing what sort of requirements the users of JAXB
might have for IDEs and tools in the area of Java XML Data binding.
If you have tools regularly, how would you like to see them extended to
help aid the development of applications that make use of JAXB?
What sort of ideas do you have for JAXB tools?
Thanks,
Tom