Hey Patrick
I'd personally love to see JAM available as a separate package somewhere with support for both a JDK 1.4 and JDK 1.5 version. It sounds great! I'd also love to see some experiment done on a JDK 1.4 runtime metadata support so that, say, as part of the build process we can turn doclet tags into some generated classes so JAM could introspect the annotations at runtime in a JDK 1.5-style way.
Then the next step would be for us to be able to use AOP-style introductions to generate the annotations using pointcuts (e.g. rules to define where the annotations should go) so we don't have to litter our code with doclet tags that we could infer using some simple rules in our build systems (e.g. design patterns, naming conventions and so forth - allowing the use of doclet tags to overload any such rules).
Once we get there I'd be a very happy chap :)
On 27 Mar 2004, at 03:23, Patrick Calahan wrote:
Hello everyone. I am a committer on Xml-Beans, another project currently in the Apache Incubator. As part of my work there, I have developed an API for representing Java types and their associated metadata which I believe would be of general use to the community.
The API is called 'JAM' - the Java API for Metadata. On the surface, it looks quite a bit like Reflection or the Doclet API, but it affords a greater level of flexibility and convenience, and in particular provides solutions for a number of thorny problems posed by JSR175.
I have had a few discussions with some folks on [email protected] about possibly spinning JAM up as an independent project from xbeans. It was suggested that it would be useful to test the waters in some other projects such as Geronimo to see if JAM would indeed be generally useful. So, here I am testing. :)
Anyway, if you want more gory details, I have temporarily posted some white papers and the API docs here:
http://www.pcal.net/jam
Any feedback is more than welcome.
Thanks,
-Patrick
James ------- http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/
