After years and years of development, I've finally released version 1.00 of Jude. Jude is an alternative to javadoc. It displays definitive API documentation from documentation comments in Java source code. But its output is easier to browse than javadoc, it is better looking than javadoc. And it is searchable. And customizable. Want to see methods listed alphabetically? Jude does that. Want them grouped functionally instead? A single keystroke will toggle between these two views!
There are too many features to describe here. If you haven't tried Jude yet (or recently), please give it a spin:
- Read more about Jude (and view screenshots) on the home page, and in the User's Guide and Administrator's Guide.
- Download the Jude 1.00 release here.
- Get an evaluation license to make the release work here
- And, if you like it, you can buy a license (for less than you'd spend on a good Java reference book) here.
@__DavidFlanagan
So it requires a license and doesn't work in IE. Why is this better than Javadocs?
JZacker:
Jude requires a license, and the current version does not work in IE. And it is better than javadoc. Those statements are not incompatible!
Read the user's guide if you want to know why I think it is better. Or take the 10 to 20 minutes it takes to get an evaluation license and install the software and try it out.
Jude requires a license because it is commercial software. Jude competes with my Java books. Releasing it as free software would not be in my best interest.
Jude does not (currently) work with IE because it was originally written as a Mozilla XUL application. It no longer uses that architecture, but still relies on Mozilla's support for CSS. IE is simply not standards compliant enough to display Jude's output correctly. This is an issue I plan to address in a future release.
A demo would help a lot.
Why did you give up on the XUL implementation?
I really like the idea of Jude and I think it generally works well. Trouble is, I find the screen display too cluttered and I'm not keen on the big bold fonts for method names. Maybe you could have add an option to make the colours and fonts look like the Javadoc ones? There's no doubt it is much quicker than scrolling through Javadocs to find info. I like the feature that tells you what methods return the class you are broswing! I don't think ordinary Javadocs give you that.
Martin,
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
I'd been thinking that I ought to ship Jude with at least on other stylesheet. I suppose that duplicating the javadoc style would be a good fallback, or even a default.
If you like messing with CSS, you can unjar the jude.jar file to find styles/default.css. Study this to find the styles you need to modify, and you can create new styles that will be listed on the preferences page...
Or, wait a bit, and I'll try to do this.
Martin,
Here is a stylesheet you can save into a file named styles/subdued.css in your Jude installation directory. Once you've done that, restart Jude and use the Preferences page to select the style. This will get rid of the colored bars and bold member names.
@import "default.css";
/*
* section heading
*/
.s {
background-image: none;
background-color: #ffffff;
color: #000000;
padding: 0px;
margin-top: 15px;
font: 150% sans-serif;
}
/*
* Alternating color classes used with the l class below
*/
.c0 {background-color: #ffffff;}
.c1 {background-color: #ffffff;}
/*
* style for comment lines (synopsis sub-sections)
*/
.cm {
background-color: #ffffff;
padding-left: 15px;
}
/* Bright red links are too intense without bars */
A[href].j {
color: #c00;
}
.n {
font-weight: normal;
}
Did you know that there is already a software package called Jude? It's the Java/UML Object-Oriented Design Tool, available at http://jude.esm.jp/. You might want to consider a different name for your program.
Pete Boton
Pete,
Yes, I know about the other Jude.
But I had the name first. I've had versions of Jude available for download from this website since 1999.