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Generating API Documentation?

Posted by Cliff on from the ease-the-trials-of-documentation dept.

Preda asks: "I have been recently tasked with generating API documentation for new and legacy code. Given the amount of legacy code (in C, VB6, VB.NET, PHP, and other languages) and new code that needs to be documented, are there any easy auto generating API programs out there. I have done a few searches but nothing that I have found stood out as a 'use me' solution. Does anyone have any advice?"

2 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. doxygen, commentator by Dioscorea · · Score: 5, Informative
    I like doxygen for C++. It's modeled on javadoc and plots nice dependency and hierarchy graphs using graphviz.

    Other than that, there's the Commentator...

  2. Re:Don't auto generate by Zebra_X · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's just silly Leeeeeroyy. Would you have your team of 10 programmers also code in whatever style they please? Um - no? Standards are part of the development process from coding, db design and yes, even comments. It's not the developers choice to comment their code. They do it because they are told to do it, and it's their forking job. If they don't do it, ya FIAED. Plus any developer worth his salt comments when he has to work with other programmers. As far as comment formats - if you work with a decent IDE such as eclipse or VS.NET there are a couple de facto formats for comments out there. Code documentation and auto generation at an API level is very useful and it is simply one of a number of tools that you can use to maintain visibility into your code base. To say otherwise is well, just silly.