How do I get Eclipse to show the javadoc from my classes without including sources in the jar

Question

I\'m building jars where I want to package them without sources but I would like the javadoc to come up for developers in eclipse.

Answer 1

Apache Ant javadoc task will produce API html. Normally you would then distribute this as a zip file along with your jars.

Answer 2

JIDE have a tool (costs $25) that will run over your source code and strip out all the method bodies, leaving the javadoc in, and produces a zip file. You can then distribute this zip as a source zip, and your IDE will be able to read the javadocs, but of course all your logic has been removed so you can retain your closed-sourceness. Any private members and methods are not included in the zip file.

It also has the added bonus of retaining method parameter names for intellisense, so the following method

public void foo( String text, Integer index ) {
}

will show foo( String text, Integer index ) when you auto-complete, instead of foo( String arg1, Integer arg2 ) so you can hint what the parameters should be.

Answer 3

The users of your JAR can associate a Javadoc location (URL, file or path inside an archive) to it in the Java Build Path properties of the Java project, where the JAR is used.
I'm not sure how well this would work with the Javadoc in the same JAR as the binaries (never seen that before), but in theory it should work.

Answer 4

Javadocs are part of the source code, as any compiled class won't contain any comment - Javadocs are comments.

In other words, you can't.

Answer 5

What is your build process? The Maven release process actually generates 3 jars, one containing the compiled classes, one with sources and one with javadocs. You should be able to customize the POM to prevent distribution of the source jar, and anyone using Maven to manage dependencies will automatically get the javadoc if they declare a dependency on your jar (and have javadoc downloading turned on in the eclipse maven plugin).