New stuff has been learned... Old things have become new.

So, all the problem I was working through yesterday have been figured out.  Kind of disappointing in some ways.  Sort of like reading a really good short story.  Great entertainment but so short, hardly worth the effort.

I mentioned, or alluded yesterday that I had been playing around with IDE support trying to get my dtd converted into beans.  One of the places I discovered while pursuing the NetBeans route was the Schema2Beans plug-in.  Although I never got it to work inside of NetBeans I was able to pull out the libraries of the plug-in and invoke them from the command line (and from Eclipse). 

So my big nasty DTD did have some "issues" you could say, that didn't really help anything but with a little help from an XML validator and some creative hacking I got it all working.  It works quite beautifully actually.  The XML generation isn't quite as cool as my decorator but it will work.

The funny thing is as I was writing the test case I recognized the code I had written was almost identical to the way IBM's generated beans work.  So there is a [small] chance in H3ll that the old applications can migrate to this version when IBM finally deprecates their dtd converter.

Not the weekend I should have had but it was a fun little problem that didn't turn out to be that difficult thanks to those fine fellows over at NetBeans.

-Aaron