QDox vs XJavaDoc
Brett Morgan wondered if Joe Walnes should tell the XDoclet project about his new QDox JavaDoc replacement.
And the answer is: no, because XDoclet already has a completely rewritten JavaDoc engine, which has been around for some time now, and also kicks booty (which one kicks the most booty I don’t know though). The current XDoclet code is pretty fast.
QDox History
The truth is that QDox was started way before I knew about XJavaDoc (the JavaDoc parser used by XDoclet). When I found out, I initially stopped working on QDox.
A few months later QDox was revived as I was looking for a project to use in a Test Driven Development coding exercise. It turned out that we ended up with some pretty lean and zippy code as a result of the excercise which we’re now using on some internal projects. So we went ahead and released it.
QDox vs XJavaDoc
QDox is a complementary project to XDoclet but a competing product to XJavaDoc. There’s never any harm in a bit of friendly competition - it keeps us all on our toes :).
QDox has a slightly different focus to XJavaDoc. XJavaDoc offers a means to manipulate the parsed object model and write the results back out to the file. QDox, on the other hand, is designed to be smaller, simpler and focusses on speed (it has a much more optimized parser) - but it cannot modify the source file. Which one you use should depend on your requirements - they both rock.
QDox Nicities
Speed speed speed.QDox can be used in an object model approach (similar to DOM) for ease of use, or an event driven approach (similar to SAX) for raw performance. You could, for example, create a custom builder to spit out XML directly from source code rather than building an intermediate AST.
QDox Next Steps
The next goal of QDox is to offer hooks
for incremental live
code-generation where it can run as an IDE
plugin and automatically fire events to
regenerate code incrementally as individual
files are changed, making continuous
integration more continuous than having to
run a build step.Pre-indexing and querying
of large source trees is also a high
priority. For example, find me all classes
with @blah in - and their
subclasses.
Update 2003: XDoclet abandoned XJavaDoc and joined forces with us to work on QDox.
Update 2006: Eclipse IDE switched to QDox to speed up it’s JavaDoc processing.