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Let's face it: You don't need to be a designer to see that
default Javadoc looks ugly.
There are some resources on the web which offer re-styled Javadoc. But the default behaviour represents the product and should be as reasonably good-looking.
Another problem is the fact that the usability of Javadoc is not up-to-date compared to other similar resources.
Especially huge projects are hard to navigate using Firefox's quick search.
Practical question:
Are there any standalone (desktop) applications which are able to browse
existing Javadoc in a more usable way than a browser would?
I'm thinking about something like Mono's documentation browser.
Theoretical question:
Does anyone know, if there some plans to evolve Javadoc, in a
somehow-standardized way?
EDIT: A useful link to Sun' wiki on this topic.
I have created a Markdown (java) Doclet which will take source comments in Markdown formatted text and create the same HTML Javadocs.
The new doclet also does some restyling on the text, but the HTML generated is not changed at this stage.
That goes some way to address the HTML-in-java-commenting issues which is probably the biggest usability problem with current Javadoc.
I don't think that the concepts of Javadoc are outdated. As far as i can see, these concepts are rooted years ago in a product named doxygen, which is still available for other languages (i.e. Objective-C where it is heavily used). Even this has it's predecessors - have a look at the programming environment used by Donald Knuth to create TeX (Literate programming).
Nevertheless it is a intriguing idea to have a single source for program code and documentation.
Besides of that, the presentation of the documentation can be customized to your special needs using a plug-in system supported by the JavaDoc tool. You might provide a plug-in (as we do) that publishes directly into a database which is directly accessible via web. Using collaborations anyone can provide additional comments or clarifications to the documentation that might find their way back into the original source.
Javadoc is the best source code auto-documentation generation system I've ever seen. Large part of that is that it's so simple - I can browse javadocs even with my 5 year old cell phone if I want to! While I agree that a bit of a facelift could be in order and especially JDK is a pain to browse through, I wouldn't dare reinventing the wheel entirely because what we currently have is a RESTful, easy to use solution for its purpose which works just about anywhere.
I recently got a mail forwarded that Sun is working on modernizing the Javadoc HTML output. From said mail:
We are proposing improvements to javadoc/doclet for JDK7. The
project wiki page is located at
http://wikis.sun.com/display/Javadoc/Home. As a part of the proposed
improvements, the UI of the javadoc output will be revamped. The new
design screenshots are uploaded to the project wiki. The javadoc output
markup will be modified to be valid HTML and WCAG 2.0 compliant.
So there is definitely still work going on there, even if somewhat late. However, in my eyes one of the biggest drawbacks of Javadoc is its very close coupling with HTML. Many classes have Javadoc which includes literal HTML and relies on the output being HTML, too. Unfortunate, but this won't change anytime, I think. Still, this means that developers are free to include whatever they want in HTML there which might as well be invalid, non-well-formed, etc. So adapting the output from the javadoc tool is only one part of this, the other won't and can't change and thus remains.
As for browsing documentation I also find the HTML documentation a little unwieldy. I usually use the Javadoc view in Eclipse. It has drawbacks as well (slow and you can't really search) but it's Good Enough™ for most things.
Personally I still find Javadoc to be very useful. Especially since it is standardized. I don't know of any major documentation style that I find easier to navigate (that might very well be subjective, but I personally find MSDN horrible to use, for example).
For the search: Use the Javadoc Search Frame, it makes using Javadoc of all kinds a lot easier. It's available as a Userscript for Firefox and as a Google Chrome Extension.
To answer your Practical Question, I googled and asked friends and came up with these. Forrestdoc,doclet and doxygen.
The second question, I would say that yes, its not very "Web-oh-twoeye" but At least your guaranteed to work in an offline environment, and its small enough to ship along with your API. i dispise the use of frames, but then it works rather well for javadoc. I have not seen any plans to change it.
Eclipse has some support for javadoc as far as reading, interpreting and generating it goes.
You might want to phrase that in a less agressive and overbearing manner. Most people don't care what a technical resource looks like, and "It's not Web 2.0 enough!" sounds like vapid marketroidspeak.
And what exactly would you consider "more usable"? Personally, I would definitely like a full text search and a better useage browser, and AJAX could probable help with those.
Well, the nice thing about JavaDoc is that it's the opposite of outdated - it's arbitrarily extensible. Why don't you go ahead and write a doclet that produces the kind of API doc you want?
Why nobody else has done that so far (which apparently is the case) is anyone's guess - maybe nobody else feels as strongly about it as you.
There's a DocBook doclet. DocBook is a richer document type than (X)HTML and is better for describing technical content. From DocBook source you can generate all sorts of different output formats.
I personally would like a more readable "comment documentation" standard than the HTML (and hence tag-wieldy) JavaDoc.
For example, MarkDown, as used here, would be excellent, human readable in the source, nicely formatted external to the source.
With the current JavaDoc, I imagine many people use JavaDoc comments, but don't actually document to the extent they could. I'm sure everyone has browsed an API's online JavaDoc that has been non-documented or barely-documented, and thus far harder to use than it should be.
This isn't helped by code-reformatters (e.g., within Eclipse, or maybe upon source commit) that totally destroy any readable structure you might have put within a JavaDoc comment (e.g., a list of items) into one big blob of text, unless you literally use two carriage returns where you wish to use one).
Does anyone know, if there some plans to evolve Javadoc, in a somehow-standardized way?
The corresponding JSR (JSR 260), which specifies enhancements to Javadoc, has been voted out of JDK 7 (for now). An overview of what was planned (from this site):
Upgrade Javadoc to provide a richer set of tags to allow more structured presentation of Javadoc documentation. This JSR covers: categorization of methods and fields, semantical index of classes and packages, distinction of static, factory, deprecated methods from ordinary methods, distinction of property accessors, combining and splitting information into views, embedding of examples and common use-cases, and more.
The overall outlook for JDK 7 is pretty grim.
JavaDoc is itself extremely flexible because you can replace the standard doclet with a custom doclet to provide something that meets your projects specific needs.
On the project I've been working on, we created an HTML/XML-based documentation system (using client-side XSLT 2.0 on JS) for our product with JavaDoc fully integrated. For this, a custom doclet was used to produce JavaDoc data in XML, this used tagsoup to ensure even HTML markup within code comments were well formed.
With this, we were able to deliver an interactive user experience using a single-page app (similar to a desktop tool), but all from within the browser - without any server-side code/infrastructure. The viewer included standard features such as search, tree navigation etc.
Here's a link to a sample entry point in the rather vast documentation:
JavaDoc viewer sample
Here's an image also:
A smart seachable javadoc viewer:
For many times, I face the problem of browsing JavaDoc. I was looking for something just like Adnroid doc search option. At last I get something like that. If you use firefox the solution is here.
Install the plugin GreaseMonkey, its kinda customizing web page the way we see. ( We need to customize any java doc page, so we can search on class name)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
For greasemonkey to work, we need some user script for customization. This can be downloaded by greasemonkey automatically. Install the userscript from JavaDoc search frame or JavaDoc incremental search.
This works great for me.
Related
What options are there for enforcing that code is documented? I want something that will run as part of the build process e.g. a maven target that will check that code is documented (class level and method level) and report if any code is missing documentation.
Have looked at FindBugs, PMD, and CheckStyle, but they dont appear to offer this capability.
Well, I hate to tell you this, but useful documentation cannot be enforced using tools.
Checkstyle can check if Javadoc is present, but it cannot check that the Javadoc contains anything other then #param pMyParam the myParam and other meaningless junk. Even if you let some tool check the contents of the docs, this would produce loads of false positives and would lead to simple, but useful comments to be inflated only to please the checking tool. After some time, the developers will learn to filter out Javadocs when reading code like we filter out ads when reading a web page. So, all tooling will gain you nothing if the developers do not want to write good and helpful docs.
To say it with the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
My recommendation is: Use checkstyle to check for the very basics, such as the fact that each class has at least a type comment, and that interfaces document their methods as well. Then, educate the developers where necessary on what makes a meaningful and useful documentation, and make it clear that in the eyes of the development lead, good quality code has good quality docs. Javadocs can be very good even if certain methods are not documented at all. The checking can then only be done by manual inspection, e.g. by peer reviews or some kind of formalized step in the quality control process.
Just my two cents.
Perhaps it is not exactly what you are looking for but you can use Sonar and call it when you compile the code.
Sonar will provide with lots of information included checkstyle
Sonar is very easy to use and integrate with a maven project.
Doc: http://docs.sonarqube.org/display/SONAR/Installing+and+Configuring+Maven
Teamscale can check whether comments are missing. It can also assess the quality of the comments and reveal trivial as well as unrelated comments.
Disclaimer: I am a Teamscale developer.
A while ago there was this doclet from Sun called DocCheck. Creates a report from the javadoc. Don't know if its still available..
Do a google search.
Ok, google search... works with version 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. Its experimental and appears to be inactive. Is it worth using now? I don't know. That's something for you to decide.
javadoc doccheck download http://192.9.162.55/j2se/javadoc/doccheck/index.html
Which Markup Language do you use for user comments and other user generated content when building web applications for Java EE? I.e. if you were to code SO in Java, what would you use to parse the questions.
I have already found some markup languages (Markdown, Textile, BBCode, Creole...) and some of them seem to have a Java implementation, but I have not found a well-established mainstream one (for Java). Most of the related projects don't seem to be very active. For example in the MarkdownJ forums I read "I agree with you about creating anew implementation not based on regular expressions, and as such, there's a new ticket [...]" and users are reporting strange Exceptions.
I can't believe there's no standard solution. Is there any markup language you would usually use for Java projects? Can someone name a large web site using Java and (preferably an open source) compiler for a markup language like Markdown? Is using plain old HTML with some validation the default way to go?
I played with Mylyn WikiText as have others, but it's a specific format. IMO it doesn't matter a huge amount, particularly since a converter for essentially every syntax is available for the JVM, even if you end up switching languages.
Filtered HTML is fine, but it's a PITA to write in.
Honestly, I'd just pick one, or tweak one--I ended up using a combination of mostly-markdown, but with embeddable macros like XWiki/Confluence etc. originally pulled from the XWiki syntax parsing but modified. In my head I'm still working on it; in reality... not so much.
I know this question has been asked before, but that was several years ago, and of the two answers, Rome and Abdera, the first no-longer seems to be maintained (there aren't even any download links on the website, nor can I find documentation). The latter also appears rather complicated, and neither appears up to contemporary standards of Java library design.
Are there any new alternatives out there that are well designed, and well maintained?
Sorry, I do not know of any library, but, that said, seeing as RSS is an XML format you should be able to roll your own using SAX/JAXB/DOM. Which one to use depends on whether you wan ease of integration with Java (JAXB) or speed (SAX). There is a middle ground in DOM.
RSS is not a complicated format so I think you could just develop the features you need as you come across them and it'll be faster (and the skills you learn more transferable) than exhaustice searching for a library if one cannot be found easily.
Hope this helps.
I did find this class RSSDigester. It might help, I don't realy have the time to investigate it right now, sorry.
RSS reading hasn't really needed changing for some time. ROME really is quite nice, and as far as fetching it you can get it from http://download.java.net/maven/2/rome/.
I eventually found HorroRSS, which is exactly what I was hoping for. Its simple, easy to use, and appears robust.
Ever since I started playing around with Scala, I have had one big question concerning the Java API: why does Oracle keep the same old HTML page with "frameset" tags and no search function at all? It looks like they haven't made it to the Web 2.0...
The Scala API documentation on the other hand, while not the best website in the web history, is several orders of magnitude more usable.
Anyways, if anybody knows why that is and, more importantly, if there exists a Java API documentation with a better interface, please let me know!
Recently, for Java 7, JavaDoc was improved so it could use custom CSS. Here are the first results: http://download.java.net/jdk7/docs/api/. The work continues and I think we'll see more when new updates come out. I do agree that ScalaDoc is superior, but they didn't have to deal with 15 years of legacy.
Javadocs provides the output in that format and its published at that address, I guess no one really saw the need for improvement, but now that you mention it, it makes for an interesting side-project. I googled around to find if there was any "better" interface but no luck.
You could run javadoc -h to see what extra options are available if you want to re-generate the javadocs. Some interesting ones are to provide custom header/footer and linking to the source, but nothing to the effect that you are asking.
Those HTML pages were made using the Javadoc tools, a standard way to build documentation in Java.
I don't know if there are other webpages with a better formatting of the API, but if it helps you with anything, and you are using an IDE and the SDK, you can see the source code for most of the files there.
JavaDoc was designed to be the lowest common denominator. Virtually any web browser can display it, even without JavaScript support.
If you are looking for quicker access and search capabilities, you can access JavaDoc from within an IDE such as Eclipse.
I'm working on a school project in which we would like to analyze the content of webpages. We don't, however, want to deal with things like Nav bars and comments. If we were looking at a specific website we could make a parser to filter that sort of extraneous stuff out specifically for that site, but we are hoping work on arbitrary sites that we may not have ever encountered before.
I feel like it's a bit much to hope for, so I won't be surprised if nothing like this exists already, but does anyone know of a tool that can do that sort of content isolation on arbitrary websites? I've had a bit of luck diffing pages with others from the same site, but it's imperfect and leaves comments and such.
I am working in Java, but would welcome anything open source in any language that I can use for ideas.
I'm a little late to this one (especially for a school project), but if anyone finds this at some future point, the following may be helpful.
I stumbled across a Java library to do exactly this. Performance, in my simple tests, is similar to Readability.
http://code.google.com/p/boilerpipe/
You could try an unofficial API of arc90's Readability.
Basically what Readability does is extract content on a webpage and presents it to you as a nicely formatted article. Nav bars, comments, and all the other stuff that surrounds content on a webpage is gone.
im also a bit late to this conversation but ...
the Java Boilerpipe extractors are probably what you want (ArticleSentencesExtractor probably), although there is at least 1 port of the arc90 readability to java on github.
If you want to build a poor mans boilerpipe you might try diff'ing 2 pages from the same site (assuming they are using the same template you will likely get an interesting result)
The main difference between boilerpipe, readability and a diff based hack is that boilerpipe will strip out all html but preserve some structure
I doubt that anything exists that would do what you want. Without some sort of semantic markup it is next to impossible to distinguish "real" content from the other stuff. This is a task that requires real intelligence.
There are of course good tools for parsing HTML of varying degrees of correctness, and it is often possible to cobble together some pattern-based solution for dealing with pages on a particular site ... assuming that there are common structures / patterns to be elicited.