Tool support for crosscutting concerns of API documentation

  • Authors:

  • Michihiro Horie;Shigeru Chiba

  • Affiliations:

  • Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan;Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

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 written by programmers for API documentation often contains scattering text. Occasionally, it also contains tangling text. This paper presents that this problem is due to crosscutting concerns of API documentation. Then it proposes our new tool named Comment-Weaver, which provides several mechanisms for modularly describing API documentation of class libraries or frameworks written in Java or AspectJ. It is an extended Javadoc tool and it provides several new tags for controlling how the text manually written by the programmers is scattering and appended to other entries or how it is moved from the original entry to another entry to be tangling. Finally this paper evaluates CommentWeaver by using three class libraries and frameworks: Javassist, the Java standard library, and Eclipse. It showed that CommentWeaver resolves the problems of scattering or tangling text and it adequately reduces the amount of description written by programmers for API documentation.