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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T03:03:44+00:00

I have a set of Java 5 source files with old-style Doclet tags, comments

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I have a set of Java 5 source files with old-style Doclet tags, comments and annotations. And based on that I would like to write a generator for another set of Java classes.

What is the best way to do that? And are there any good standalone libraries for code analysis/generation in Java? Any shared exprience in this field is appreciated.

So, far I have found these:

  • JaxME’s Java Source Reflection – seems good, but it does not seem to support annotations. Also it had no release since 2006.

  • Annogen – uses JDK’s Doclet generator, which has some bugs under 1.5 JDK. Also it had no releases for a long time.

  • Javaparser – seems good as well and pretty recent, but only supports Visitor pattern for a single class i.e. no query mechanism like in the 2 above packages.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Both the NetBeans IDE and Eclipse JDT projects have considerable Java code analysis/generation logic. I don’t know what their dependencies are (i.e., can you use them as standalone libs), but other than that, I would take a good look at those two: it’s unlikely there’s a java code analysis library under more intensive development and more up to date.

    Update:

    PMD might be of interest as well:

    PMD scans Java source code and looks for potential problems like:

    * Possible bugs - empty try/catch/finally/switch statements
* Dead code - unused local variables, parameters and private methods
* Suboptimal code - wasteful String/StringBuffer usage
* Overcomplicated expressions - unnecessary if statements, for loops that could be while loops
* Duplicate code - copied/pasted code means copied/pasted bugs

    Additionally, this blog entry discusses various static code analysis tools.

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