I haven't touched 1.0.x for a while now, so a lot of details have
slipped my memory.
> HTML files for help are generated in a two-step process.
> On the first step, JAXB add-on (or annotation processor for 2.0)
> produces an XML representation of the grammar. This is a very simple
> definition which describes class items, contained fields and their types.
> On the second step, grammar XML together with language packs and
> user-provided descriptions is processed by the XSLT transformation which
> finally produces (X)HTML files. Separating grammar extraction and HTML
> rendering allows adjusting presentation of the help packs without
> changing the code of the add-on.
This separation makes sense. I guess that means the task is now
1) define an XML dump format of the JAXB model
2) write a nice renderer that converts it to HTML
At one point, I thought about annotating the runtime model classes with
JAXB annotations so that we can use JAXB itself to dump the model into XML.
> I was also considering XMI as the format for grammar XML. This has an
> added value of making schema-derived classes UML-ready, but XMI seems to
> be a bit overcomplicated for the task.
By the way have you seen xsddoc?
http://xframe.sourceforge.net/xsddoc/xsddocs/XMLSchema/XMLSchema.xsd/index.html
[1]
https://jaxb-architecture-document.dev.java.net/nonav/doc/com/sun/xml/bind/v2/doc-files/j2s%20architecture.gif
--
Kohsuke Kawaguchi
Sun Microsystems kohsuke.kawaguchi_at_sun.com
