Documentation Tools
The essence of documentation can never be under-estimated in software. Be it a simple standalone application catering to a single user or an enterprise application, the benefits of a good documentation are really plethora. One can understand the benefits of a good documentation on a bird's eye view in the following scenarios:
- Unknown application problem. A good documentation would help us expedite our troubleshooting efforts.
- New Features or Newer versions. Developing of newer versions of the product or software is a breeze for a software which has good documentation accompanying it.
- Process-centric. A good documentation ensures that the software is more process-centric and targets its goals rather than having a dependency on the developer or the coder who has actually implemented the function. This is greatly helpful in software organizations where a new developer needs to take charge of maintaining a software once the old guy is shifted from the project or goes of on a new career.
Now, in this post, we would some of the good documentation tools that help us towards getting a good documentation for our programming languages.
- JavaDoc -- A premiere tool for documentation that comes embedded with Java SDK and helps to generate friendly documentation for our API based on comments in the code.
- NDOC -- A friendly documentation generation tool for .NET applications. It supports a wide variety of documentation formats like Compiled HTM (CHM), JavaDoc and Plain vanilla HTML or XML.
- Comment Web Pages option -- Our desktop IDE, Visual Studio .NET has an excellent document generator option called 'Build Comment Web Pages', that greatly support documentation of the code.
- JsDoc -- A premiere tool for documentation of JavaScript pages.
So, I think, we should take an initiative to start commenting our code and a best combination of the tools above to make our programs self-reliant and well-documented.