JavadocViewer 1.1

Introduction

Javadoc is a tool that comes with the Java Development Kit and it automatically creates an API documentation from comments embedded into the source code. Javadoc can be extended by Doclets to output the documentation in any format. The default Doclet produces HTML files that can be viewed with any standard web browser. All the documentation for the Java API is built this way.

The Solution

This approach has advantages but suffers from the static HTML interface. The obvious solution is to implement a custom Doclet and a matching viewer in Java - creating a rich, interactive interface without sacrificing platform independence and without abandoning the existing architecture. And that's where JavadocViewer comes in.

I came up with the idea to design such a tool when writing a term paper at university. I recently foundsome time to do a complete re-programming and this is the result of these efforts. The JavadocViewer consists of a Doclet and a Viewer component. The Doclet uses the Standard Doclet provided by Sun to write the HTML documentation and creates a file with meta-data for the Viewer. The Doclet might also archive both the meta-data and all HTML docs into a single file using the JAR library. The Viewer is a Swing GUI that loads the meta-data and HTML files and displays both in a tree view, an index and a browser window. Version 1.1 adds a powerful search engine (Jakarta Lucene by the Apache Software Foundation) and improves navigation.

The JavadocViewer 1.1 is freeware. Please see the Readme file for detailed license information.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me.

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