Doxygen
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Please help improve this article by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (September 2007) |
| Doxygen | |
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| Developed by | Dimitri van Heesch |
| Latest release | 1.5.6 / May 18, 2008 |
| Written in | C++ |
| OS | Cross-platform |
| Genre | Documentation generator |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | http://www.doxygen.org |
Doxygen is a documentation generator for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and to some extent D. It runs on most Unix-like systems, including Mac OS X, as well as on Windows. The first version of Doxygen borrowed some code of an old version of DOC++; later, the Doxygen code was rewritten by Dimitri van Heesch.
KDE uses Doxygen for parts of its documentation and KDevelop has built-in support for it.
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[edit] Usage
Like Javadoc, Doxygen extracts documentation from source file comments. In addition to the Javadoc syntax it supports the documentation tags used in the Qt toolkit and can generate output in HTML as well as in CHM, RTF, PDF, LaTeX, PostScript or man pages.
[edit] Example code
The following illustrates how a C++ source file can be documented.
/** * The time class represents a moment of time. * * @author John Doe */ class Time { public: /** * Constructor that sets the time to a given value. * @param timemillis is a number of milliseconds passed since Jan 1. 1970 */ Time(int timemillis) { } /** * Get the current time. * @return A time object set to the current time. */ static Time now() { } };
An alternative approach that is preferred by some for documenting parameters is shown below and will produce the same documentation. The advantage with this approach is if you delete a parameter or change the meaning of a parameter you're more likely to update the documentation.
{ /** * Constructor that sets the time to a given value. * */ Time(int timemillis ///< timemillis is a number of milliseconds passed since Jan 1. 1970 ) { } }
[edit] See also
- Comparison of documentation generators
- Eclox : Doxygen front-end free software plugin for Eclipse distributed under the term of the GNU General Public License.
- Graphviz : Doxygen can use GraphViz to generate diagrams including class hierarchies and collaboration for C++, Java and Python.
- Standard interface documentation
