In
software development
Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...
, a documentation generator is an
automation
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, mainly by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machine ...
technology that generates
documentation
Documentation is any communicable material that is used to describe, explain or instruct regarding some attributes of an object, system or procedure, such as its parts, assembly, installation, maintenance, and use. As a form of knowledge managem ...
. A generator is often used to generate
API documentation which is generally for
programmers or operational documents (such as a manual) for
end user
In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ultimately use a product. The end user stands in contrast to users who support or maintain the product, such as sysops, system administrato ...
s. A generator often pulls content from
source,
binary or
log files.
Some generators, such as
Javadoc
Javadoc (also capitalized as JavaDoc or javadoc) is an API documentation generator for the Java programming language. Based on information in Java source code, Javadoc generates documentation formatted as HTML and other formats via extensions. ...
and
Doxygen, use special
source code comments to drive content and formatting.
See also
*
Comparison of documentation generators
*
Template processor
A template processor (also known as a template engine or template parser) is software designed to combine ''template''s with data (defined by a data model) to produce resulting documents or programs.
The language that the templates are writte ...
*
Static code analysis
In computer science, static program analysis (also known as static analysis or static simulation) is the analysis of computer programs performed without executing them, in contrast with dynamic program analysis, which is performed on programs duri ...
*
Literate programming
*
Integrated development environment
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a Application software, software application that provides comprehensive facilities for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source-code editor, build automation tools, an ...
References
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