Kohsuke Kawaguchi's Blog

XML Schema and documentation generation for Apache Jelly

I'm one of the few people who are still using Apache commons Jelly actively. I use it as an HTML macro engine in tools like htmlmacro, I use it to render views in Hudson, and I still occasionally use Maven1 to build my old projects, which uses Jelly big time.

One of the pain points of using Jelly is that there's no schema for tags, so you can't take advantages of the modern schema-aware IDEs and XML editors.

So over the holidays, I took the little doclet developed in Jelly to auto-generate documentation like this, packaged it up as a Maven2 plugin, and also added an XML Schema generation capability. I also run the schema generator against the Jelly tags developed in Apache, and posted schemas here.

In addition, I've defined a few annotations so that one can improve the generated schema by specifying which attributes are required, or which tags expect child tags.

So if you still use Jelly in your projects, I hope you'll find this interesting.

Comments

• Yay - go Jelly! :)

  Posted by: jstrachan on January 07, 2009 at 03:34 AM

• Good to hear from the creator of Jelly himself!

  Posted by: kohsuke on January 07, 2009 at 10:17 AM

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