Removing Beehive dependency on APT?

[Carl McConnell <ca...@instantiations.com>]

Hi all,

I'd like to raise an issue we've run into on the Eclipse Pollinate project; 
namely, the dependence of Beehive on Sun's APT tool for generating the 
necessary web artifacts. Having APT in the picture has posed some 
difficulties for Pollinate. Since Sun's license precludes tools.jar from 
being included in the Pollinate distribution, Pollinate can't be used out 
of the box without some configuration (pointing it to tools.jar) that's 
unusual for an Eclipse feature like this. Also, due to the way that APT 
uses class loaders, Eclipse itself has to be invoked in an unusual way so 
that tools.jar is included in its class path. I consider the latter an APT 
bug that I'll take up with the APT developers, but my point is that APT is 
an uncomfortable fit with the Eclipse world.

It would be nice if Beehive could avoid using APT, perhaps by basing its 
processing on JDT (the Java development technology in Eclipse) a la Tomcat 
1.5. Perhaps an APT-workalike could be written based on JDT as yet another 
open-source project. Or perhaps Beehive could use JDT directly to do its 
processing, since in my limited understanding Beehive essentially uses APT 
to parse Java files, examine the annotations on Java elements in those 
files, and generate other files based on those annotations. I think JDT 
could be used for this purpose, although I should point out that the JDK 
1.5 support in JDT is still under development.

I understand that moving away from APT would be a lot of work, and is 
unlikely to become a high priority for Beehive. I just wanted to get the 
issue on the table. Thanks.

	Carl McConnell
	Eclipse Pollinate Project