XRAI. Rickard and James Strachan had very good ideas for the XRAI module. I agree with both of you! I like Rickard’s ClassAttributes and serialization idea. I also agree with James that a JAXP-style approach is needed. So we’ve done our WBD (Weblog-Based Design!) and now I have approval for the module from some of the best brains of this industry! Wow! Weblog rocks!

[Memory Dump]

Indeed. And all the bits for implementing this already exist. I had a quick play with QDox and got it printing out all my javadoc tags. Wrapping them in XML should be fairly straightforward. Building an ant task to generate all the MyObjectAttributes.xml files in the build directory should also be trivial. Then its just a matter of the return journey, which simply involves writing a default implementation of Rickard’s ClassAttributes class that knows to stick ‘Attributes.xml’ on the end of the class name and look for it in the classpath. Load the file, parse the XML, cache the Attributes in a HashMap and you’re done.

Its almost too easy…