Spring XDoclet

I have been hand-coding the Spring's XML application context file or known as the bean definition for quite some time. Because I am too lazy to read thru the XDoclet documentation and due to the lack of examples, especially in the @spring.bean tag section. And due to "programmer's itch" I started to tinker with it this very night. And this is what I got.

Listing 1: is a very plain sample Interface

public interface MySampleService {
 
 
 public void showSpring(String greetings);
 
}

Listing 2: I added a simple xdoclet tag defining the bean id for Spring application context in one of the implementation classes

/**
 * @author Jared Odulio
 * @spring.bean
 *     id="sample-service"
 *
 */
public class MySampleServiceImpl implements MySampleService {
 
 
 
 public void showSpring(String greetings) {
  // TODO Auto-generated method stub
  if (greetings == null){
   System.out.println("My Sample Service");
  }else{
   System.out.println(greetings);
  }
 }
 
}

Listing 3: Another sample implementation class

/**
 * @author Jared Odulio
 * @spring.bean
 *     id="another-sample"
 *     
 */
public class AnotherService implements MySampleService {

 
 public void showSpring(String greetings) {
  // TODO Auto-generated method stub
  if (greetings == null){
   System.out.println("Another Sample Service");
  }else{
   System.out.println(greetings);
  }  
 }

}

Listing 3: This is our Ant build.xml file

<project name="sample-proj" default="spring" basedir=".">
 
 <property name="conf.dir" value="${basedir}${file.separator}conf"/>
 <property name="src.dir" value="${basedir}${file.separator}src"/>
 <taskdef name="springdoclet" classname="xdoclet.modules.spring.SpringDocletTask"/>
 <taskdef name="doclet" classname="xdoclet.DocletTask"/>
 <target name="spring">
  <springdoclet destdir="${conf.dir}">
   <fileset dir="${src.dir}"/>
   <springxml destinationfile="appcontext.xml"/>
  </springdoclet>
  
 </target>
 
</project>

Listing 4: When we run Ant, this what we should have

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC
    "-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN"
    "http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd">

<beans
  default-autowire="no"
  default-lazy-init="false"
  default-dependency-check="none"
>

  <bean
      id="another-sample"
      class="AnotherService"
  >

  </bean>

  <bean
      id="sample-service"
      class="MySampleServiceImpl"
  >

  </bean>

  <!--
     To include additional bean definitions for Spring in the generated
     application context file, add a file to your XDoclet merge directory
     called spring-beans.xml that contains the  markup.
  -->

</beans>

There you go! Bean definition file auto-generated by XDoclet.

Take note, under normal circumstances, the build.xml file should not look as the example on Listing 3, I used Eclipse to run this, so the necessary "path" and "pathelement" tags are not present in the build.xml file because I defined all the XDoclet-related libraries in the Ant Runtime Preferences. But those tags should be defined if the build.xml has to be run outside Eclipse. I am just too lazy to do that now. And I just came from a calorie-burning, heart-pounding squash tennis game at Kallang, I should say it's BAFTB (Better and Faster Than Badminton).