Doclet programs work with the Javadoc

Javadoc

Javadoc is a documentation generator from Sun Microsystems for generating API documentation in HTML format from Java source code.The "doc comments" format used by Javadoc is the de facto industry standard for documenting Java classes. Some IDEs, such as Netbeans and Eclipse automatically generate...

 tool to generate documentation from code written in Java

Java (programming language)

Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...

.

Doclets are written in the Java programming language and use the doclet API to:

• Select which content to include in the documentation.
• Format the presentation of the content.
• Create the file that contains the documentation.

The standard doclet included with Javadoc generates API documentation as frame-based HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 files. Many non-standard doclets are available on the web, often for free.
These can be used to:

• Create other non-API types of documentation.
• Output the documentation to other non-HTML file types such as PDF.
• Output the documentation as HTML with additional features such as a search or with embedded UML
  UML
  UML may refer to:* Unified Modeling Language, an object modeling and specification language used in software engineering* User-mode Linux, an architectural port of the Linux kernel* University of Massachusetts Lowell, in the United States...
  
  diagrams generated from the Java classes.

External links

• http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/tooldocs/javadoc/overview.html
• Overview of available non-standard doclets.
• UML Doclet