Specifications

Documenting Your Projects

You can produce many different kinds of documentation for your programming projects,

including, but not limited to the following:

• Design documentation

• Technical documentation/developer’s guide

• Data dictionary (including class documentation)

• User’s guide (although most Web applications have to be self-explanatory)

Our goal here is not to teach you how to write technical documentation, but to suggest that you

make your life easier by automating part of the process.

In some languages, there are ways of automatically generating some of these documents—

particularly technical documentation and data dictionaries. For example,

javadoc generates a

tree of HTML files containing prototypes and descriptions of class members for Java pro-

grams.

Quite a few utilities of this type are available for PHP. Some of these are

• phpDoc, available from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpdoc

This stores the documentation in a MySQL database. Take note that the term phpDoc is

used to describe several projects of this type, of which this is one.

• PHPDocumentor, available from

http://phpdocu.sourceforge.net

PHPDocumentor

gives very similar output to javadoc and seems to work quite robustly.

• phpautodoc, available from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpautodoc/

Again, phpautodoc produces output similar to javadoc.

A good place to look for more applications of this type (and PHP components in general) is at

SourceForge:

http://sourceforge.net

SourceForge is primarily used by the UNIX/Linux community, but there are also many projects

for other platforms.

Building Practical PHP and MySQL Projects

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