What is Livedoc ?
Livedoc is a Java library that inspects the Java code of your API and builds its documentation based on what it found. It was inspired by JSONDoc, and aims at allowing users to generate a documentation with the least possible effort. Ain’t nobody’s got time to write doc!
Design Goals
Write less
The code never lies, handwritten docs do. That’s why most of the doc must come from the code, and if not, then from the Javadoc. Using Livedoc’s annotations is considered a failure of Livedoc to grasp an aspect of your code.
Stay Live
Parts of the configuration of your app happens at runtime, that’s why Livedoc generates the doc from running code.
Just work
Livedoc just works with as little configuration as possible. It is almost completely configurable, but most of the decisions have already been made for you to get the best of Livedoc in most situations.
Features
Spring integration
Livedoc does not require you to use a particular framework, but it integrates very well with Spring. It understands Spring’s annotations and generates the doc from that without further configuration. Using Spring is certainly the way to make the most out of Livedoc.
Javadoc aware
Livedoc is able to read the Javadoc, thus removing the need to use extra annotations.
UI
Livedoc also provides a UI that you can use to visualize the documentation.
Check out the live demo of Livedoc’s UI to see what it looks like. You can see the code directly in this Github repository as the sample-app subproject.
Get started with Livedoc
Choose your Livedoc flavour:
- Spring Boot (recommended)
- Spring MVC
- Other framework
Then you may then check out:
- how to read some documentation from the javadoc
- how to serve the documentation with the provided UI
Credits
Credits to @fabiomaffioletti for his great work on the original JSONDoc project, and to all contributors that helped him build JSONDoc up to version 1.2.17, which I started from.
Special thanks to @ST-DDT for his very constructive feedback, both on the original project and on Livedoc.
Livedoc uses the therapi-runtime-javadoc library by @dnault for its Javadoc-related processing.