XSDoc: an Extensible Wiki-based Infrastructure for Framework Documentation

Good quality documentation is crucial for the effective reuse of object-oriented frameworks, and must be adaptable to the needs of different audiences. To satisfy these needs, framework documentation combines several kinds of documents and contents, resulting in hard, costly and tiresome to produce, specially when not supported by appropriate tools and methods. This paper presents XSDoc, an extensible infrastructure based on a WikiWikiWeb engine that supports the creation, integration, publishing and presentation of framework documentation. XSDoc helps on creating and annotating framework documents, on integrating different kinds of contents (text, models and source code), and provides a simple and economic cooperative web-based documentation environment that can be used standalone in a web-browser, or in an integrated development environment. A small example shows how easy it is to use XSDoc for producing part of a document for JUnit testing framework.