A few days ago, I had my first experience with Doxygen, an open-source documentation generator similar to Javadoc.
After a few hours of documenting my code to a satisfactory level, I had a very professional-looking set of HTML documentation. At work the next day, I used Doxygen to generate code for a Visual C# class library, which had been documented with XML comments.
Doxygen supports most C-derived programming languages including C, C++, Java and C#. It also allows you to define custom pages and sections; you are not limited to code documentation.
Documenting a method is very simple:
/// @brief Calculate the sum of two values. /// /// Adds the two values together and returns their sum. /// /// @param[in] aa The first value. /// @param[in] bb The second value. /// /// @return The sum of both values. /// /// @note This method is deprecated! /// /// @see operator+() int add(int aa, int bb);
A full list of Doxygen commands is available here.
April 19, 2007
