What tools are available for documenting jQuery plugins? [closed]

Answer 1

Have you had a look at Natural Docs? It might not have very much of explicit support for JavaScript, however it does a quite good job anyway. Of course you can trick it not to understand the code, but if you play nice with it, it can be a hell of a tool.

Answer 2

Javascript documentation tools are still relatively immature, so there aren't 50+ ones like there are for say JavaDoc, and the ones that do exist don't handle complex cases like jQuery plug-ins (or at least none of the ones I've ever seen).

However, Javascript is an extremely flexible language, so you could just rewrite your plug-ins in a way that makes your documentation tool happy.

For instance, instead of:

(function($) {
    $.yourMethod = function() {/* do something */}
})(jQuery);

you could do:

function yourMethod = function() {
    /* do something */
}

(function($) {
    $.yourMethod = yourMethod;
})(jQuery);
delete yourMethod

or just:

jQuery.yourMethod = function() {
    /* do something */
}

Those two options aren't truly identical; the first one will overwrite any existing yourMethod function, and the latter will not have the nice "privacy" of the standard plug-in format. Depending on what you're writing this plug-in for, those issues may or may not matter to you.

If they don't, re-styling your code may be a viable way of making your JSDoc parsable. If not ... good luck finding a mature enough JSDoc tool (or writing your own) :-)

Answer 3

I use Visual Studio XML comments: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2007/04/23/the-format-for-javascript-doc-comments.aspx

Answer 4

I used doxygen this way:

/** @cond */

jQuery(function($){

    $.fn.TestFunction = function(){ testvar="test1";test("test2");alert(testvar); }

/** @endcond */

    /** DoSth Function */
    function test(testvar)
    {
       alert(testvar);
       var testvar="test3";
       alert(testvar);
    }

/** @cond */

    delete test;
});

/** @endcond */