4.3. Generating the API Documentation Website

The Javadoc tool (javadoc) reads/parses the Javadoc comments in a set of Java source files and produces a corresponding set of HTML pages describing classes, interfaces, constructors, methods, and fields. This effectively creates a website for the API documentation.

Note

You don’t have to understand website design to create a documentation website because the javadoc tool does the website creation!

Make sure you are in cs1302-javadoc. Use the command presented below to generate the API documentation website for the code contained in this tutorial and place it in the doc subdirectory.

javadoc -d doc -sourcepath src -subpackages cs1302

Understanding the Command

Here is a brief description of the command-line options that were used:

  • -d – specifies the destination directory where javadoc saves the generated HTML files;

  • -sourcepath – specifies the search paths for finding source files (.java); and

  • -subpackages – specifies the packages for which documentation should be generated.

Check Your Work

Take a minute to watch the video below to see the expected output from the commands so far in this chapter:

You likely noticed that the javadoc command generated a few warning messages. That’s okay for now. It’s just letting us know that we are missing comments for some of our code. We will fix that soon. For now, run ls doc to make sure files were generated. These files contain our API Documentation website! Don’t worry, you won’t need to open those files. However, we will want to make them visible on the Web. We will do that in the next section!