Ashkelon for OSJava
August 16th, 2004 by HenFollowing on from seeing jdocs.org turning up, I decided to set up Ashkelon for OSJava.
http://wiki.osjava.org:8080/ashkelon/apis.do
It’s running on a postgres database, and I had only 2 real problems. The first was a Tomcat ant task in the build file that was not found on my system. The author (Eitan Suez) quickly helped, and I commented out the relevant chunk.
The second is that Ashkelon ships with the JSTL 1.1 jars, though it only uses JSTL 1.0 taglibs. I run on a Tomcat 4 server, so a quick rollback of the jars was all that was needed here.
Once you set your database up, there’s an init.sql script to get you started and then you write an xml file per API and load it in. The output for loading in is a bit too verbose to be of use to the normal user, so although I saw a lot of warnings, and even a few errors, I’ve no clue if they were bad or not.
It decided to hang on one project (scraping-engine), so I probably need to talk to Eitan about that too. In fact, checking it out, scraping-engine failed to load, but when I loaded xmlwriter, it decided to call it scraping-engine instead of xmlwriter. Odd.
Now that I’m listing issues. Another problem it has is not liking codebases that share package namespaces. Because I’ve been splitting up a larger codebase, I have a few projects that have code in com.generationjava.io. Ashkelon doesn’t (possibly by design) separate these, so when you look at Genjava-CSV, you can’t see the classes that are in that project.
It’s definitely a lot smoother than my Multidoc hack, but I’m not convinced yet that it offers enough to be worth a database and a Java server. jdocs.org’s comment feature will be a happy addition if that turns up, and it would be nice if it could use a Maven POM directly to save on configuration time.