I spent an hour or two last night learning about Doclets, studying the
sources (the Oracle pages are just a collection of obsolete material
and broken links) and also looking at tools such as UMLGraph, ApiViz
and Doclava to see how they work.

I experimented with writing a GeoTools doclet and supporting classes,
extending existing com.sun classes as much as possible. It certainly
seems possible but it's not pretty and I'm wary of the many comments
in the Sun sources which say "this class is not written to an API".

Doclava (http://code.google.com/p/doclava/) looks promising. It
provides a template system to define page contents and layout. The
sources are understandable. It has a sympathetic licence (although I
haven't checked for different licences across the sources yet) and
provides good Maven support. It has a few weird loose ends, such as
presently lacking support for @author and @version tags, but they seem
trivial to patch.

It will be a little while before I can do more on this - gt-swing and
the raster processes are higher in the queue, plus my overdue jaitools
tasks, and then there's my paid work :)  But the short story is I
think Doclava or something similar is preferable to writing our own
classes and will also let us add other useful features to the javadoc
pages such as stable links to docs pages and tutorials.

Michael


On 27 September 2011 19:34, Michael Bedward <[email protected]> wrote:
> Excellent - thanks for the tip Andrea. That might be just the thing,
> either to use directly or just to steal some good ideas from.
>
> Michael
>
> On 27 September 2011 19:22, Andrea Aime <[email protected]> wrote:
>> There might be no way to do what you want using the standard doclet
>> api, which is pretty
>> limited, but in the past I've worked on umlgraph, a tool that
>> generates class diagrams out
>> of java code, and that has a custom doclet embedding said diagrams in
>> the javadoc output.
>>
>> Instead of being a taglet the tool wraps the standard javadoc generator 
>> though
>> Might be worth checking out, it's a more heavy weight approach (might
>> be way heavier
>> than you are interested in) but it also gives you a lot of liberty in
>> what the output
>> will look like.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Andrea
>>
>> --
>> -------------------------------------------------------
>> Ing. Andrea Aime
>> GeoSolutions S.A.S.
>> Tech lead
>>
>> Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
>> 55054  Massarosa (LU)
>> Italy
>>
>> phone: +39 0584 962313
>> fax:      +39 0584 962313
>>
>> http://www.geo-solutions.it
>> http://geo-solutions.blogspot.com/
>> http://www.youtube.com/user/GeoSolutionsIT
>> http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreaaime
>> http://twitter.com/geowolf
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------
>>
>

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