Introducing DRY Doc, a tool for modifying API documentation from a web interface and store them back to the sources.
DRY Doc is the subject of my final exam work. It started two weeks ago and will be ongoing until end of October 2009.
I decided to start an Open Source project which will improve the way API documentation is managed. The basic concerns is to leverage the API documentation completeness and precision, mostly at the begining of a project. I'm always surprise to see cool projects with a terrible doc, and the effort it seems to be to release a good API doc.
I would like to encourage the storage of the API documentation in the source code, but a good one. It can be great if some other guys can edit this kind of documentation. Perhaps that you already face this strange feeling of having an open bug opened by a tech writer which complains about a typo or a missing explaination for an obscure method in your API. What if this guy, a tech writer or a super-user could modify directly the faulty doc himself? You just avoid a bug report and improve the documentation. You win the fact that the modification stay in you source code and that it will be updated by the developer next time he makes a change to the code.
So, the goal of this project is to provide a two way API doc. First you generate the doc from the source code, then you write back any modification to it. The moto could be:
Generate API doc on day 1, make it good on day 2, maintains for ten more years.
For those of you who care about, I'm finishing my studies in software engineering in Yverdon High School Of Engineering and Management (codename Heig-Vd). I'm doing those studies along my full-time job by VMware. So this work is likely to be a spare time job. It should take arround 600 hundred work hours.
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