[Cp-tools-discuss] Adding Wiki functionality to gjdocs

[Christopher Oezbek]

Hi,

  this is a little request for comments for an idea that cropped up  
recently when looking into the classpath docs: Wouldn't it make sense to  
enrich the whole javadocs idea with Wiki-functionality for online  
collaboration? Using the online interface a user could make modifications  
on the javadocs tags which directly get reflected on the gjdocs pages. Of  
course it would be important to reflect those changes also back into the  
source code and make it available for commit by a developer (in contrast  
to the casual documentation user).

A nice effect of the wiki interface to modifications of the documentation  
would be that it becomes much easier to contribute, especially if you  
think about the fact that often people probably hit problems with the  
documentation when using it rather than when developing. Giving the  
classpath user a chance to contribute to the documentation at the point  
where it causes an itch without having to go over explicit patch creation  
could help a lot.

Of course implementation details of reflecting changes in the JavaDoc back  
into the source are tricky (I don't think it can be easily done with  
standard doclet API) but it is surely possible.

Do you think documentation generation could benefit from using a wiki in  
general?

Greetings,
  Christopher

P.S.: There is a entry in the mediation wiki  
http://developer.classpath.org/mediation/ClasspathCurrentTopics#head-0ed6accd06362ea1269b89c7f2e4cd0ad2532cad  
about the idea being discussed on IRC.

There is also a more extended treatment of the idea with some thoughts on  
implementation, social issues, use-scenarios and such at  
http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/~oezbek/cgi-bin/view/Docu/WikiDoc

--
Christopher Özbek
Arbeitsgruppe Software Engineering
Institut für Informatik
Freie Universität Berlin
Takustr. 9, 14195 Berlin, Germany
+49 30 838 75242, Raum 008
http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~oezbek/