XDoc An Extendible Documentation Generator

Date: February 26

Time: 11:00

Room: Unnik 311

Speaker: Rob Vermaas

Title: xDoc - An Extensible Documentation Generator (Slides in pdf)

Abstract

Documentation is an important part of any software system. Documentation is often generated automatically from in-source documentation comments. There are already many documentation generators, however they lack the ability to easily adapt to language extensions or to add new visualizations to the documentation. Often when a new language is designed, a completely new documentation generator is developed for this language, even though the documentation generated is often very similar.

This situation leads to the necessity of a documentation generator that allows easy adaptation and extension. The result of my thesis work is xDoc, an extensible documentation generator. xDoc can be extended with new languages, new visualizations and different documentation comment syntax. By separating the language-specific tasks from the generic tasks, we have created a package in which the documentation generator developer only has to focus on the language specific tasks.

The documentation generated by xDoc contains API documentation and a code browser.