Doclets: Decipher and Document Java Code Easily

rying to understand the logic of an unfamiliar Java project can be taxing. Learning the project's code is even more difficult when there is no knowledge transfer from the developer(s) who developed it. Increasingly, this is becoming a common task for developers, which isn't necessarily bad news because it provides a great opportunity for job security. A developer becomes indispensable when he or she is the knowledge source for existing projects.

Doclets, a new addition to Java SE 6, is very handy for reviewing existing source code and mastering the logic behind it. Doclet is a starting class for defining the entry point methods of the package com.sun.javadoc. The Doclet API is an extension for Javadoc, the original Java tool that automatically creates documentation from source code files. The Doclet API provides various features for customizing documentation output and offers architectural means for embedding the crux of source code logic for new projects inside custom tags—the proper way to document logic. This enables future developers to simply review the custom tags documentation to understand the logic instead of scouring through the entire documentation.