I came accross the xdoclet project and see it enjoys/ed high popularity. So the question is, now that we have annotations in java: is xdoclet legacy?
Or is there something to xdoclet I didn't see/understand.
XDoclet is an annotation implementation via JavaDoc. Anything that could be done with XDoclet (and much more) can be done with JDK5+ annotations.
One obvious difference however is that XDoclet is non-invasive. That is, it doesn't require you to import classes into your own code. If you are using 3rd-party Java annotations in your own code, then of course you cannot build your code without the 3rd party jars present. This is not a drawback that XDoclet suffers from. (You may not see it as a drawback at all.)
Of course, even though XDoclet may be legacy, I suspect that for most projects which have relied heavily on it, there will be no rush to migrate to using annotations (maxim: if it ain't broke, don't fix it).