Today I'm going to talk about Intent, an open-source documentation environment integrated to Eclipse.

As I'll explain later, the main issue with any documentation is that it quickly becomes outdated in regards to the code. That's why the main purpose of Intent is to keep your documentation synchronized with any concrete development artifact (whether it's Java code, Models, dependencies between plugins, a code example on the Internet...).

With Intent, we also wanted to put documentation in a central place of software development. Following the Eclipse mantra "be extensible, be customizable, be integrated", Intent will allow you to pimp your doc according to your needs, by defining custom high-level constraints on your software, or providing your own documentation languages and specific tools.

The Intent project is currently in incubation phase under the Mylyn-Docs component. An Intent 0.7 first build has been released last week and is waiting for your feedback.