You may have already see the great 'Is XDoclet really Needed' thread on TheServerSide ...
Well, it was quite a long time I wanted to write about my personal opinions on Code Generation concepts and XDoclet as one of the good implementations. Hhhmmm... After getting into the mentioned thread, I thought it's a good chance to write what I have in my mind. And here is my reply
Feel free to post your comments if you're thinking in the similar or other ways...
Armond
Man! It's not believable... JDK 1.5 (a.k.a Tiger) is going to bring us a very efficient archiving format maybe comparable with CAB or so! Great thanks to JSR200 group and William Pugh for what they've done in this regard. The new compression format is called Pack200 and there is the way to go back and forth from JAR to Pack200 and vice versa. After the JVM sharing and Swing enhancements, I guess it's going to be the next big thing for the client side java. javax.pack package ROCKS!
Reading some test results here, they're just amazing and seem unbeatable. Can't wait to have it in action on my client side applications (specially)!!
Armond
Just was studying the new JSP 2.0 expression language. While I was really excited to see that the new language is more like OGNL (an already accepted and used stuff) and those old ugly stuffs are going be deprecated, I got sort of depressed when got into the block-styles such as ugly < c : if >, < c : foreach > and < c : set >... Why a new style when there are wide spreaded, already accepted and used syntaxes like Jakarta Velocity 's ones? :-(
Explicitly talking, I like Velocity syntax for these kinds of blocks and in my opinion they're more recognizable within a large block of XML code. Don't you prefer the following syntax? Isn't it more straight forward?
< p >
#if( $action.hateJSPStyle )
I < b >hate< / b > the new JSP expression language.
#else
I < b >do not hate< / b > the new JSP expression language. It seems tolerable...
#end
< / p >
I hope those working on specs have enough reasons for going that way! I myself do not like to have many standards in my mind all for one purpose!!
Armond