Article

Free access

API documentation from source code comments: a case study of Javadoc

Author:

Douglas KramerAuthors Info & Claims

SIGDOC '99: Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Computer documentation

Pages 147 - 153

https://doi.org/10.1145/318372.318577

Published: 01 October 1999 Publication History

PDF eReader

Abstract

This paper describes in a general way the process we went through to determine the goals, principles, audience, content and style for writing comments in source code for the Java platform at the Java Software division of Sun Microsystems. This includes how the documentation comments evolved to become the home of the Java platform API specification, and the guidelines we developed to make it practical for this document to reside in the same files as the source code.

Reference

[1]

Friendly, L. The Design of Distributed Hyperlinked Programming Documentation, 1995, Presented at the International Workshop on Hypermedia Design 95. httpYjavasun.com/dccs/javadoc-paper-html

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Chiodini LPiatti SHauswirth MHermans FBohrer R(2024)Judicious: API Documentation for NovicesProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E10.1145/3689493.3689987(89-97)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689493.3689987
Dearstyne KRodriguez ACleland-Huang J(2024)Supporting Software Maintenance with Dynamically Generated Document Hierarchies2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00046(426-437)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00046
Su CBansal AMcMillan C(2024)Revisiting file context for source code summarizationAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-024-00460-x31:2Online publication date: 27-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-024-00460-x
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

API documentation from source code comments: a case study of Javadoc

Recommendations

Using Javadoc and XML to produce API reference documentation
SIGDOC '02: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation

The creation of API reference documentation and its integration into larger documentation sets present a number of challenges. This paper explores a strategy for using Javadoc, the primary mechanism for generating Java API documentation, in conjunction ...
Tool support for crosscutting concerns of API documentation
AOSD '10: Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development

Writing detailed API (Application Programming Interface) documentation is a significant task for developing a good class library or framework. However, existing documentation tools such as Javadoc provide only limited support and thus the description ...
Patterns of Knowledge in API Reference Documentation

Reading reference documentation is an important part of programming with application programming interfaces (APIs). Reference documentation complements the API by providing information not obvious from the API syntax. To improve the quality of reference ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

SIGDOC '99: Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Computer documentation

October 1999

220 pages

ISBN:1581130724

DOI:10.1145/318372

Chairmen:
Johndan Johnson-Eilola
Purdue Univ., Lafayette, IN
,
Stuart A. Selber
Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 October 1999

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

SIGDOC99

Sponsor:

SIGDOC

SIGDOC99: 17th International Conference on Systems Documentation

September 12 - 14, 1999

Louisiana, New Orleans, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 355 of 582 submissions, 61%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

99
Total Citations
View Citations
1,982
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)174
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)24

Reflects downloads up to 15 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Chiodini LPiatti SHauswirth MHermans FBohrer R(2024)Judicious: API Documentation for NovicesProceedings of the 2024 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E10.1145/3689493.3689987(89-97)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689493.3689987
Dearstyne KRodriguez ACleland-Huang J(2024)Supporting Software Maintenance with Dynamically Generated Document Hierarchies2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00046(426-437)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME58944.2024.00046
Su CBansal AMcMillan C(2024)Revisiting file context for source code summarizationAutomated Software Engineering10.1007/s10515-024-00460-x31:2Online publication date: 27-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10515-024-00460-x
Kodetzki MBordis TKirsten MSchaefer I(2024)Towards AI-Assisted Correctness-by-Construction Software DevelopmentLeveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Software Engineering Methodologies10.1007/978-3-031-75387-9_14(222-241)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-75387-9_14
Bhat ACoursey AHu GLi SNahar NZhou SKästner CGuo J(2023)Aspirations and Practice of ML Model Documentation: Moving the Needle with Nudging and TraceabilityProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581518(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581518
Bansal AEberhart ZKaras ZHuang YMcMillan C(2023)Function Call Graph Context Encoding for Neural Source Code SummarizationIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.327977449:9(4268-4281)Online publication date: 24-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3279774
Liu ZXia XLo DYan MLi S(2023)Just-In-Time Obsolete Comment Detection and UpdateIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.313890949:1(1-23)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2021.3138909
Haque SBansal AMcMillan C(2023)Label Smoothing Improves Neural Source Code Summarization2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00025(101-112)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00025
Midingoyi CPradal CEnders AFumagalli DLecharpentier PRaynal HDonatelli MFanchini DAthanasiadis IPorter CHoogenboom GOliveira FHolzworth DMartre P(2023)Crop modeling frameworks interoperability through bidirectional source code transformationEnvironmental Modelling & Software10.1016/j.envsoft.2023.105790168:COnline publication date: 18-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.envsoft.2023.105790
Kostić MBatanović VNikolić B(2023)Monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual code comment classificationEngineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence10.1016/j.engappai.2023.106485124(106485)Online publication date: Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.engappai.2023.106485
Show More Cited By

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Using Javadoc and XML to produce API reference documentation

Tool support for crosscutting concerns of API documentation

Patterns of Knowledge in API Reference Documentation