The Stat Data Provider Inc. development team scours their code and frantically attempts to piece together a development guide. Unfortunately, they have forgotten the details of how certain portions work. The Javadoc(TM) tool can deter such a situation from showing its ugly face. In this article, the reader is guided through self-documenting code in a structured manner to generate Java(TM) API documentation.
Using Javadoc - Taking a Peek at the Automagically Generated Documentation (Page 4 of 5 )
The documentation files are generated to the specified directory (i.e., :documentation). Open the index.html file in a web browser and examine its contents. First, notice the description pulled from the opening comment. Next, notice the values of the version and author reflect their respective javadoc tag values. (See Figure 2).
Finally, notice the method summary containing the javadoc comments specified for each method (See Figure 3).
Figure 3: Generated Javadoc: Method Summary
Privacy Please
It is important to note that only elements marked public will have their Java documentation exposed to the outside world. You can see this with the sample class, with the getMiddleName method. No Java documentation is exposed since the method is marked as private.