useful javadoc thingies

so, tell me something about javadoc

javadoc is part of java. it scans your code for special comments and tags and creates api documentation from that. it looks like this in its default incarnation, which is just a little bit ugly. it also offers no way for stylesheets to even think of making it prettier. except for hacking some css around the html 4.0 layout you can’t really do much with it.

this is where the org.aspsimon.javadoc comes in. eventually it will create a fully css’ed version of the javadoc html. it will leave the frames though, because even though they’re ugly as sin, they are really handy.

right now, however there is only a taglet for formatting @todo tags as bullet-lists from your javadoc comments. the standard behaviour for added tags is to hang them together with commas, but we here at aspsimon.org (ok, simon thinks) think a bullet list is more suited for todos.

ToDoTaglet

the javadoc for this neat little thing (not that you’ll actually ever need it) is here.

usage with javadoc:

add the following parameters to your javadoc command line:
javadoc -classpath javadoc-aspsimon.org.jar -taglet org.aspsimon.javadoc.ToDoTaglet

usage with ant:

add additionalparam=”-taglet org.aspsimon.javadoc.ToDoTaglet” and classpath=”javadoc-aspsimon.org.jar” to your javadoc target.

what tags does it offer?

use the @todo tag to annotate methods, classes, packages and overviews. the output code looks like this:

<DT><B>TODO:</B><DD>
<ul>
<li>make the communication a bit more robust </li>
<li>methods for handling communication and returning 
response codes.</li>
<li>make server, method and port configurable</li>
</ul></DD>