Question

I have been working in a C++ project that uses doxygen to generate documentation output. The method of documentation we use looks like this:

//! This is an awesome method.  You should totally use this method for all sorts
//! of cool stuff that you might want to do.
//! @returns something useful
string my_awesome_method() {...}

As you can see, we use the //! comment prefix to indicate a doxygen comment block. We have found that this works very well for our needs.

Now we are adding a Java component and would like to maintain consistency with the commenting style that we have used in C++ rather than move to the, what we consider to be awkward, /** */ style used by javadocs. Is there a way to get javadocs to recognize other prefixes like doxygen does? Or does javadocs require the use of /** */? We could just use doxygen, but there are all sorts of niceties that are built around javadocs such that we would like to maintain the interface with this ecosystem.

Is this possible? I’m afraid that the answer is probably no. 🙁

Answer 1

Yes, /** */ is the only comment format recognized by javadoc. See http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/index-137868.html#format.