The new WebBeans spec defines a way to configure beans using a neat XML trick where you place the Java package name for a bean into a namespace. Both Scott and Gavin King have written about this, so I won’t rehash the details. One concern of those looking at this approach is that tooling won’t be easy to write to resolve the package names from XML namespaces.
Lately I’ve been working on the Resin plugin for Eclipse, so I thought I’d give it a shot to write some basic IDE facilities for WebBeans. Here’s a screenshot using an example from Gavin’s blog:
You can see that it was pretty easy using Eclipse’s built-in Java and XML analysis tools to extract the class name of the tag under the mouse pointer and then pull the Javadocs from the class. Now, this plugin is pretty fragile and it doesn’t do a lot yet, but for a guy who doesn’t know much about Eclipse (i.e. me ;-)) to whip this up in a couple days means that tooling for WebBeans XML shouldn’t be difficult.