Is there a generally-accepted documentation generator for Objective-C (similar to RDoc for Ruby)? I've seen Doxygen and ObjcDoc, and am wondering which is most widely used.
+5
A:
Doxygen is very widely used. I seem to use it as an SO answer about once a week, too.
Charlie Martin
2009-05-01 22:21:07
A:
As well as doxygen, apple has a tool the comes with the development tools. It generates the type of documentation you see on things like the SystenConfiguration framework. The tool is called HeaderDoc the documentation can be found in the HeaderDoc User Guide.
Jason Coco
2009-05-01 22:35:23
HeaderDoc development is pretty stagnant. Doxygen is a much better choice. With appropriate add-ons, Doxygen output can be made to look very similar to HeaderDoc if that's your preference.
Barry Wark
2009-05-02 00:14:07
Stagnant or not, it's a valid option for generating documentation for Objective-C/C/C++. I personally hate the documentation that Doxygen generates.
Jason Coco
2009-05-02 01:01:05
+13
A:
Doxygen is probably the most widely used option. Because it's not just for ObjC (Doxygen supports many other languages), the development is lively and the community quite strong. HeaderDoc (now an open source project), by comparison appears to have largely stagnated. HeaderDoc only produces HTML output, while Doxygen also produces PDF, LaTeX and many other output forms besides HTML. Even Apple seems to recommend Doxygen, with this guide to automatically producing documentation sets, compatible with Xcode's help viewer, from within your Xcode build process.
It's worth noting that Doxygen can read HeaderDoc-style comments, so you can write your documentation in HeaderDoc style and decide later whether to produce the final output using Doxygen or HeaderDoc.
Barry Wark
2009-05-02 00:19:45