Yes exactly! I do have my Eclipse setup to display the javadoc when I hover my cursor over a class name or method name - I have been doing that for years. It is great!
However, this new project I have built is the first time anyone on my team has actually written any overview and package comments. In the past we have relied too much (IMHO) on external documentation that is not as easy to find or access. I am trying develop a new culture where we keep the documentation closer to the source code where people work routinely. Some day I need to find some better tools for creating HTML that just the Eclipse HTML editors. I am very good at writing raw HTML, but my productivity is not very good doing things in such a manual way. Eventually I want to learn how better access the javadoc some people deploy with their Maven artifacts as it is still the case I import something from Maven, but cannot see the javadocs from Eclipse, yet I know they are in the distribution. Cheers, Eric On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 6:47 AM, Mark H. Wood <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, you *could* rely on your IDE to show you the Javadoc *for the > class or method you're currently focused on*. But then you'd miss > seeing that you forgot to write the overview, you forgot to write most > of the package comments, or that 80% of your classes and methods have > either no topic sentence, a useless one, or one that is bizarrely > formatted and unreadable. Or the amount of material that doesn't > really say anything which would help someone not already intimately > familiar with the code. Documentation should be generated and > reviewed regularly. > > -- > Mark H. Wood, Lead System Programmer [email protected] > Asking whether markets are efficient is like asking whether people are > smart. >
