Codavaj 1.2.0 review
Downloadcodavaj is javadoc in reverse
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codavaj is javadoc in reverse. A seemingly useless tool. Arguably of interest only to the most hardcore java hackers. A "must have" in every geek's software toolbox. ( hitchhikers guide entry Nr. 151776 ).
Codavaj is a reverse engineering tool with focus on Javadoc. Currently codavaj is distributed as a command line tool ( codavaj.cmd - using org.codavaj.Main class ). A 100% java tool.
You can:
- convert an entire local javadoc tree into java source code.
- download an entire remote javadoc tree via http(s).
- derive a Reflection-like API based on information derived from a javadoc tree.
Codavaj works by converting javadoc HTML into XML by using Nekohtml and then successively deriving class information from the XML using XPATH queries ( using dom4j ).
Not because i lost the sources for some code - but miraculously still had the javadoc for it! This wouldn't help much anyway because codavaj leaves you with a TODO for each method implementation.
For me this was simply an intellectual challenge - a side battle in a hobby programmer's grand master plan. As a bonus i managed to improve my XPATH query skills a bit. It took me 2 full working weeks to get the initial version out. If I needed this once, then there's bound to be someone out there who might like to use it, for whatever reason. It probably will save them the 2 weeks too.
What's New in This Release:
New features include the ability to parse javadocs generated by the 1.5 javadoc tool.
The known limitations are that enums and generics constructs are not supported yet.
Several minor bugs in parsing constant values like "NaN" and "0d/0d" were fixed.
A Linux/Unix-like command line tool was added.
Codavaj 1.2.0 keywords