Like all good developers, I’m lazy. I follow the DRY principle.  On my current project, that means using our Oracle schema as the design of record, and then using iBATOR to generate our DAOs and transfer objects.  It also means extracting documentation out of Oracle.

One of my co-workers, Phil, found a very nice tool called Oradoclet that grabs the metadata and code from an Oracle database and outputs it in a Javadoc like form (see the example).   Unfortunately, it’s limited to Oracle, and apparently hasn’t been maintained in a few years.

It works quite nicely for our purposes now, and Phil and I are talking about reviving the project to expand it to other databases.  Our ultimate goal (a long way off) is a project-wide meta-data management system, that links the Java elements to the database objects (and ideally to requirements, UI screens, etc.)  We’ll see how that turns out.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.