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Discussion on: Let's talk about the state of auto-generated documentation tools for JavaScript

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cjbrooks12 profile image
Casey Brooks • Edited

This is a really great, thorough evaluation of auto-doc tools! While I do not work much in Javascript and don't know the landscape and tools very well, I have been building a general-purpose documentation generator for quite some time, Orchid. It currently supports generating docs for Java, Kotlin, Swift, and CSS, but I am starting to look into possibilities for documenting other languages as well, especially Javascript!

As you've noticed, there are lots of tools, and all of them ultimately do one thing well but usually don't look that great, and if you're looking for multiple forms of documentation you'll end up needing multiple different tools for each. Orchid is designed to incorporate many different kinds of docs in one tool (code docs, wikis, changelogs, blogs, or anything else), with great theming capabilities so you make easily make it look exactly how you want, and full-text static searching capabilities to make it easy to browse the docs. Strikt.io just went live with Orchid docs, and is a great example of what kinds of sites Orchid can generate.

If you do end up rolling your own solution, or if you know of any of these tools that can generate JSON, I would love to help get it integrated into Orchid.

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joelnet profile image
JavaScript Joel

My "roll my own" solution would probably just solve my problem. I wouldn't want to maintain anything. Maybe it would be better for me to contribute to another project so that I don't have to maintain it afterwards. I already have too much on my plate. lol.

I'm just surprised this section of the ecosystem still isn't as evolved yet.

I'm glad you are looking at other areas like JavaScript. Documentation is something that should be mandatory for every project and tools like this that ease the pain give people less excuses to not do it.

Cheers!

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joelnet profile image
JavaScript Joel

If you do end up rolling your own solution, or if you know of any of these tools that can generate JSON, I would love to help get it integrated into Orchid.

I found this recently, which would be a great help if you do choose to roll your own docs: github.com/eslint/doctrine

doctrine takes a jsdoc block and converts it into an AST.