JUnitDoclet - The Story

The idea of JUnitDoclet was raised in 2001 by Steffen Gemkow, who was consulting as a Java- and OO-Coach at that time. But Steffen never really had the time to implement his idea. Steffen talked with friends at his company about JUnitDoclet. Among them: Andreas Braig. He liked the idea and promised to write an article about it, once JUnitDoclet would be there. In March 2002 Steffen went on vacation and when he returned, he had created version 0.1 of JUnitDoclet. Andreas and Steffen did some refinements and asked Uwe Petschke, Frank Finger, Falk Lehmann and Martin Uhlig to review version 0.3.

Steffen was developing a framework for the programming contest "The Way Out" in April 2002. Of course he used JUnitDoclet, now in version 0.4. It was quite stable, but very limited in terms of customization. JUnitDoclet 0.4 shipped as a stealth release with the framework of "The Way Out" and got some attention. In July, when Steffen was coaching a team of C++-Developers on their way to serverside Java, he introduced not only ANT and JUnit to them, but JUnitDoclet as well. The acceptance of JUnit paired with JUnitDoclet was at a level, Steffen hasn't seen before. Andreas wrote the article as promised and pushed Steffen to make JUnitDoclet more adaptable. He even wrote a major part of the TestCases covering all the new features (compared to 0.4).

We discovered, that there was a project called JUnitDoclet at SourceForge already. Robert Watkins from Australia had created some tool with the same name. When he learned about the other JUnitDoclet, he was surprised by the wealth of features implemented and offered to change the name of the tool he created, so that this JUnitDoclet can be hosted on Sourceforge. Thank you Robert. This is much more than we expected.

In summer of 2005 Fabrice Bellingard suggested a plugin for Eclipse (called: e-junitdoclet) which he offered to write. It is available as Beta 1, so please go ahead and check it out.

JUnitDoclet is the result of a team effort. Credits go to Steffen Gemkow, Andreas Braig, Uwe Petschke, Falk Lehmann, Frank Finger, Martin Uhlig, Robert Watkins and Fabrice Bellingard.