“Doxygen is a documentation system for C++, C, Java, Objective-C, Python, IDL (Corba and Microsoft flavors), Fortran, VHDL, PHP, C#, and to some extent D.” Doxygen offers a number of advantages to the software developer who is looking to keep their documentation consistent and up to date with what the source code is actually doing.Besides its free price being hard to beat (I haven’t yet found someone willing to pay me to use their software), Doxygen allows us to use the comments within header, source and other text files to generate our documentation in common formats such as HTML, RTF or PDF.Doxygen will allows the developer to show how a project was implemented by browsing files, classes, modules, variables and other types that are used in the program in addition to generating graphs to show how they interact with each other.
DOXYGEN WIZARD GRAPHVIZ UPDATE
One of the most important yet most neglected tasks in embedded software development is writing and maintaining documentation.As software engineers we usually start strong by documenting everything but when the pressure is on, the boss is breathing down our necks, the client is antsy to see a functional prototype and the world is falling to shambles, we bury our heads in the code and just crank it out as fast as possible.We trick ourselves into believing that we’ll update that software document as soon as this deadline is met and things slow down a bit.In reality, the code either goes undocumented or is sprinkled here and there with half thoughts and gibberish in a rushed attempt to provide illumination into what has become the chaotic.ĭocumentation is a tedious and unrewarding part of our jobs.None of us want to do it, yet if we don’t, maintaining and updating the code can be become a nightmare for fellow developers or even forgetful future versions of ourselves.Luckily for us, documentation challenged developers have gone before us and a number of unique tools for easing our burden exist.These tools scan our source code and allow us to auto-generate our documentation by turning the comments that we already include in our code into documentation.A few examples of software tools that perform this function are JavaDocs, NaturalDocs and my all time favorite and primary focus of this article, Doxygen.
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