We are generating our hibernate mappings with XDoclet, we also have our classes and methods documented with Javadoc. We have a requirement for our project to generate a "data dictionary" document - a list of tables, the columns, and descriptions. It occurred to me that all of the data we need is in the Javadoc comments - the standard comments, plus the hibernate tags, so shouldn't it be possible to use XDoclet to generate such a document?

Any ideas? I'd love to be able to generate this automatically as we have around 100 tables each with say 10 columns...

you can hack xdoclet to do it, but it's easier to user metadata api to generate the doc.
Take a look at ClassMetaData + property apis for example, it's very easy to use and you'll be able to get all mapping infos.

That seems like it would work nicely for me to get the hibernate mapping info and do something with it, but i was hoping to also pull the Javadoc (non-hibernate) comments as well, which would be the description part of the dictionary