Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

How the Quick Reference Is Generated

For the curious reader, this
section explains a bit about how the quick reference material in

Java in a Nutshell and related books is created.

As Java has evolved, so has my system for generating Java quick
reference material. The current system is part of a larger commercial
documentation browser system I'm developing (visit
http://www.davidflanagan.com/Jude
for more information about it). The program works in two
passes: the first pass collects and organizes the API information,
and the second pass outputs that information in the form of quick
reference chapters.

The first pass begins by reading the class files for all of the
classes and interfaces to be documented. Almost all of the API
information in the quick reference is available in these class files.
The notable exception is the names of method arguments, which are not
stored in class files. These argument names are obtained by parsing
the Java source file for each class and interface. Where source files
are not available, I obtain method argument names by parsing the API
documentation generated by

javadoc . The parsers
I use to extract API information from the source files and

javadoc files are created using the Antlr parser
generator developed by Terence Parr. (See http://www.antlr.org for details on this very
powerful programming tool.)

Once the API information has been obtained by reading class files,
source files, and

javadoc files, the program
spends some time sorting and cross-referencing everything. Then it
stores all the API information into a single large data file.

The second pass reads API information from that data file and outputs
quick reference chapters using a custom XML doctype. Once
I've generated the XML output, I hand it off to the
production team at O'Reilly. In the past, these XML
documents were converted to troff and formatted with GNU

groff using a highly customized macro package.
In this edition, the chapters were converted from XML to Framemaker
instead, using in-house production tools.

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