Eclox ( http://home.gna.org/eclox ) is an Eclipse plugin that implements a simple interface to the system Doxygen . The objective of Eclox is to provide a light level of integration of the process of software documentation within Eclipse through a user interface that hides the“complexity” of Doxygen. In Figure 1 there is shown a functional diagram of Eclox.
Figure 1 Schematic diagram of the plugin Eclox.
The points of greatest strengths are the ease of creating and managing Doxyfile through the user interface, integrated doxygen invocation and then processing the output from Doxygen directly on the standard Eclipse console.
Unfortunately, by December 2009 the development and maintenance of Eclox was discontinued. The version currently available is 0.8.0, declared compatible with the version of Eclipse 3.3.xe later. Personally I installed the latest version of Eclipse PDT Eclox without any problem.
The current version of Eclox if I remember correctly is based on version 1.5 by Doxygen, however this does not affect the operation of the plugin even on a higher version of Doxygen (as in my case I installed on my machine version 1.8 by Doxygen ) unless it intends to use special features of Doxygen introduced with later versions to 1.5.
Going directly to the practice, build the documentation with the help of this tool is very simple, the steps are:
- Make sure you have Doxygen installed and configured correctly;
- Install the plugin on Eclipse Eclox following the standard procedure or follow the directions provided on that page http://home.gna.org/eclox/ # download ;
- Configure the plugin. This operation is necessary when the plugin can not find on the system you install Doxygen, maybe because it was not installed in a standard place or the installation of Doxygen is not defined in the environment variable PATH ;
- Create Doxyfile in your project that you want to generate documentation;
- Run the process of creating documentation.
In these cases the pictures are worth a thousand words written, it is then shown to follow a series of images that summarize the previous scheme. The process remains valid for all operating platforms.
Figure 2 Progress of the installation process of the plugin Eclox.
Figure 3 Configuration of the installation path of Doxygen.
Figure 4 Creating Doxyfile from the menu File -> New -> Doxyfile.
Figure 5 Interface (basic mode) for editing the Doxyfile.
The interface in the basic mode shown in Figure 5 is almost similar to the Doxygen GUI natively installed with Doxygen.
Figure 6 Interface (advanced mode) for editing the Doxyfile.
The interface in advanced mode allows you to have access to all configuration parameters for the engine Doxygen, how useful for some special uses, such as customizing the CSS for output in HTML format. For more “geeks” you can view the source of Doxyfile generated through the GUI, just open the file with your text editor (see Figure 7).
Figure 7 Doxyfile opened with a simple text editor for Eclipse.
Figure 8 Execution of the command to generate the documentation.
The command Build Documentation of the context menu start Doxygen on the basis of the configuration previously set (Doxyfile). The progression of the process of creating documentation is shown on the Eclipse Console (see Figure 9).
Figure 9 Output console Doxygen during the processing of the source code.
In the following figures (Figure 10, Figure 11 and Figure 12) you can check the result obtained by the process of generation of documentation. Man and HTML output formats are required during configuration. Note are localized versions of the documentation for both formats.
Figure 10 Result of the process of creating documentation in HTML format.
Figure 11 Example of Ajax on the research project documentation.
Figure 12 Result of the process of creation of documentation in Man
Its true that Eclox about a year ago is no longer maintained, I still think that can be a valuable tool to support developers who need to use Doxygen to generate documentation of your source code.