Appealing API Documentation with taglets

There are a couple of tools that allow to produce appealing API documentation with Javadoc.

The taglets library is one of them.

Using taglets

The taglets library has defined a couple of visually attractive taglets that allow to highlight important information within an API or even render Java source code (e.g. for example usage scenarios). Here is an example from the API documentation of one of our projects (it shows an element of an annotation):

Maven Configuration

To integrate this in your Maven build, use this configuration for the Maven Javadoc Plugin:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-javadoc-plugin</artifactId>
  <configuration>
    ...
    <taglets>
      <taglet>
        <tagletClass>net.sourceforge.taglets.Taglets</tagletClass>
        <tagletArtifact>
          <groupId>net.sourceforge.taglets</groupId>
          <artifactId>taglets</artifactId>
          <version>2.0.3</version>
        </tagletArtifact>
      </taglet>
    </taglets>
    ...
  </configuration>
</plugin>

This snippet shows only the relevant part for the integration of the taglets library. The artifact can be found on our Nexus server.

References and other Resources

• taglets.sourceforge.net - for more information on this library.
• Using PlantUML - shows how to use PlantUML from within Javadoc.
• Appealing API Documentation with UMLGraph - short article on how to use UMLGraph in Javadoc to automatically generate UML class diagrams.
• Taglet - more information about taglets as part of Javadoc.