GhostDoc Equivalent for Eclipse(Java)

Question

I'm a big fan of GhostDoc's automatic comment generation in Visual Studio so am looking for an plugin that does the same job with my Java code in Eclipse. Any recommendations?

Answer 1

Never used GhostDoc, so not sure what extra functionality it gives, but if it's about generating type and method comments based on the name, parameters, return type etc. then eclipse has it built in, so no extensions needed.

Answer 2

It is basically the equivalent of Javadoc, which can be generating in eclipse with the shortcut:

ALT+Shift+J

(when you are within the Java function you wish to add javadoc for)

From there, if you really want XML format, you can try and use a JELDoclet

Answer 3

GhostDoc has a nice extra feature that infers a description of what the method does by parsing the method name and providing this as skeletal documentation. For example, using GhostDoc on a method named GetDocumentName() might return the phrase "Gets the document name". While this is hardly more information than provided by the method name, it adds method documentation where previously none existed. Some might argue that this is barely useful. I argue to the contrary because it supports generating documentation from the source code (e.g., for tools like NDoc or SandCastle).

In my opinion the greatest benefit of GhostDoc over eclipse's "Generate Element Comment" is that it encourages programmers to begin adding documentation comments by adding an extremely fast and reliable way create this. The programmer can accept the inferred text, (suitable in 50 - 80% of cases), or expand on this for more complex methods. For the junior programmer who is not as familiar with how documentation comments are used, this can quickly shorten the learning curve and encourage good programming practices.