[DrJava] User Documentation

[Charles R. <cr...@ri...>]

   After experimenting with a few different options, I've decided that 
DocBook is a good way to go for writing the user and developer 
documentation for DrJava.  It's a very simple XML format, and is widely 
used for project documentation.  If you want more information on it, 
follow some of the links at the DocBook Wiki (http://docbook.org/wiki/).

   Anyway, the initial framework has now been committed.  The docs 
directory is within edu/rice/cs/drjava, which isn't ideal, but works 
well enough.  (Ideally it would be parallel to the src directory, but we 
can't easily change the CVS root, which currently starts at the src 
directory.)

   There is now a "docs" target to call from ant, which will generate 
the HTML files for the documentation if you have "docbook2html" on your 
path.  I know this is installed on at least the Linux CS machines (eg. 
nunavut), though I haven't found it on the Solaris ones.  The HTML files 
will be written to a "docs" directory next to your "built" directory.

   There is also a "commit-docs" ant target, so that changes to the 
documentation can be committed without having to run all the tests.

   At the moment, only the user documentation has been started (not any 
of the developer docs).  It has chapters on getting started and editing 
programs, as well as an appendix on how to configure DrJava.  As soon as 
I get simple chapters written for the Interactions, Compiler, and JUnit 
integration, I'll start posting it on the main web site for users.  (It 
should be a useful companion to the upcoming stable release.)  I can 
post a private copy on my own page if people are interested in seeing 
what's there so far (without compiling it themselves).  Anyway, there 
will be lots of changes to it over the next few days, but feel free to 
send me any feedback.

Charlie