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

  • Authors:
  • Douglas Kramer

  • Affiliations:
  • Sun Microsystems, Inc., Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • SIGDOC '99 Proceedings of the 17th annual international conference on Computer documentation
  • Year:
  • 1999

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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.