Overview

Classdoc vs. Javadoc

Download

Documentation

Examples

Overview

classdoc is a Java reverse engineering API documentation generator based on the Java Doclet API.

Think of classdoc as an alternative to Java's standard tool javadoc which generates Java API documentation by parsing classes and source files to create HTML files or other documentation formats.

classdoc does the same, with the important difference that it does not need source files. This way, you can create a complete overview on the classes and their members (field, methods, ...) of any Java program.

classdoc implements the Java Doclet API so that any Doclet can be used to generate output. By default, the JDK 1.3 Standard Doclet is used.

classdoc is freely available including the source code. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Important: classdoc runs on JDK 1.3 only, since the Java Doclet API has undergone several incompatible changes in later versions.
JDK1.3 is still available for download at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download.html.

Classdoc vs. Javadoc

The following schemes visualize the differences between classdoc and javadoc.

Download

The download archive contains the compiled classdoc classes, documentation, the source code and an example of classdoc and javadoc output generated from classdoc implementation.

classdoc10.zip (~200K)

Documentation

This is also included in the download archive.

classdoc Documentation

Examples

(not included in the download archive)

Star Office 5.2 API Documentation for Java

This documentation has been completely reverse engineered by classdoc from the .jar files included in the StarOffice 5.2 SDK.

HTML (online) | HTML (.zip, ~4.6M) | Postscript^* (.zip, ~1M)

^* The postscript documentation has been generated using the TexDoclet by c2-tech. After 2191 pages (!) the doclet stopped due to a an out of memory error. This has not been fixed, however, the resulting postscript file is valid and a nice example for what classdoc can generate when used with third-party-doclets.