An Open Source Fascicule

Documentation is the most important aspect of project development. A well documented project is not only easy to understand for others who may want to read it but also for the author himself. I never used to document my code until the day I realized first hand the problems it can create.

As it is rightly said – “Programming is 10% coding and 90%documentation”.

For me documenting has been and will always be the most boring aspect of writing code. But then I came to know about the JavaDocs and its support in Netbeans. If I like java for any reasons the most important of them would be that it has made writing world class standard and formatted documentation a child’s play. And what more...

NetBans 6.1 has made the thing even better. So now not only are you just a click away from generating neatly edited and polished html pages for all the code that you have written, but it also helps you to write formatted JavaDoc comments through the newly added feature of “intelliscence” as I like to call it. (The term was originally coined and is popularly used in regard to the Microsoft Visual Studio).

Just type ‘@’ within your javadoc comment and do ‘CTRL+SPACE’ and the feature will provide you will all the options that you can further write. If you say @see then it will provide the list for all documents that may be referred. The new addition seems to be really cool and is a real help as far as I am concerned.

Though it prompts for most of the possible options the options @author, @serialfield, @version seem to be missing.There must be a good reason for it which I haven’t yet figured out. Or else we can surely expect the additions in the next version.

Till then keep docing the intelliscent way!!

Reference:

1. To learn how to write comments for javadoc tool : http://java.sun.com/j2se/javadoc/writingdoccomments/
2. For a tutorial regarding creation of javadocs in NetBeans : http://javadoc.netbeans.org/