[soc-dev] GSoC 2013, Code Recommenders for Javadoc

[Patrick Gottschaemmer <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm a student at the Darmstadt University of Technology and a Eclipse 
contributor for the Code Recommenders project and I'd like to 
participate in GSoC 2013.
After a brief talk with Marcel Bruch, we came up with the idea of 
extending the Javadoc Tool [1] with some elements from Code Recommenders 
including a social component.

For instance, we'd like to include some of Code Recommenders' statistics 
like
* when selecting a package: 'What are the most frequently overwritten 
(used) classes in package org.eclipse.xyz*?'
* when selecting a type: Which methods of type X frequently used by clients?
* when selecting a method: which methods are frequently called together 
with m()?
* when selecting a type: A field of this type has been frequently 
annotated with @Inject or @Named (as of interest for e4 developers for 
instance)

and similar documentations.

For the generation part, I plan to extend the Javadoc Tool framework by 
one or more 'Doclets' (see [1]) that allow different extdoc providers 
(based on the extdoc providers of Code Recommenders) to contribute 
directly to the generated HTML output via the Javadoc api.
In contrast to the normal way how the javadoc command is used, I'd like 
to develop a little helper utility that fetches and unzips the sources 
directly from a maven repository, runs the normal javadoc tool and adds 
the recommenders documentation to the standard javadoc output, and 
finally uploads the updated javadocs to the repository or deploys them 
on a website.

In addition (when there is still some time :-) ), I'd like to enable 
users to directly edit, comment or rate on API documentation and new 
code snippets, which are provided by the Snipmatch subproject of Code 
Recommenders. Alternatively, these code snippets could also be posted 
directly by developers through the webinterface or even via a REST API 
(so you could implement an additional IDE plugin for this afterwards). 
The code snippets shall be grouped by java classes and/or packages, 
which then can be tagged, commented and rated by other developers. Top 
rated code snippets ('favorites') will appear at the top of the list, 
similar to stackoverflow.com.

For this, an additional backend (a RESTful api) will be needed, which 
stores and organizes the code snippets, including tags and comments by 
users.
The snippets shall be inserted dynamically in the (so far static 
generated) Javadoc website. For the server-side part I'm thinking of 
using OData [2] protocol backed up by a sql database like mysql.

I'm very interested in the idea of having a dynamic social component in 
the generated Javadoc website and looking forward to implement it.



Best regards,
Patrick Gottschaemmer


[1]http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/javadoc/
[2]http://www.odata.org/