If you’re a PHP developer, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Doxygen. Doxygen is a documentation generator that can be used to create documentation for multiple programming languages, including PHP. While Doxygen has its pros and cons, in this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at some of the key advantages and disadvantages of using Doxygen for documenting PHP code.
Advantages of Using Doxygen
One of the biggest advantages of using Doxygen is that it can save you a lot of time. With Doxygen, you don’t have to manually write documentation for your code; instead, you can simply add comments to your codebase and let Doxygen do the rest. This can be a huge timesaver, especially if your codebase is large or complex.
In addition, Doxygen can also be used to generate documentation in multiple formats (including HTML, PDF, and man pages), which makes it easy to share your documentation with others. And because Doxygen uses a standard format for its documentation (known as Javadoc), it’s also easy to integrate Doxygen with other tools and applications.
There are several ways to mark a comment block as a detailed description:
You can use the Javadoc style, which consists of a C-style comment block starting with two *’s, like this:
/** * ... text ... */
or you can use the Qt style and add an exclamation mark (!) after the opening of a C-style comment block, as shown in this example:
/*! * ... text ... */
In both cases the intermediate *’s are optional, so
/*! ... text ... */
is also valid.
A third alternative is to use a block of at least two C++ comment lines, where each line starts with an additional slash or an exclamation mark. Here are examples of the two cases:
/// /// ... text ... ///
or
//! //!... text ... //!
Note that a blank line ends a documentation block in this case.
Some people like to make their comment blocks more visible in the documentation. For this purpose you can use the following:
/********************************************//** * ... text ***********************************************/
Note: the 2 slashes end the normal comment block and start a special comment block.
Note: be careful when using a reformatter like clang-format as it may see this type of comment as 2 separate comments and introduce a spacing between them.
or
///////////////////////////////////////////////// /// ... text ... /////////////////////////////////////////////////
or
/************************************************ * ... text ***********************************************/
Disadvantages of Using Doxygen
Despite its many advantages, there are also some potential downsides to using Doxygen. One potential issue is that Doxygen-generated documentation can sometimes be difficult to read or navigate. This is often due to the fact that Doxygen includes a lot of information in its documentation (e.g., detailed class hierarchies, lists of all classes and methods, etc.), which can make it challenging to find the specific information you’re looking for.
Another potential downside of using Doxygen is that it can be difficult to configure. While this isn’t necessarily a negative point per se—after all, most software tools require some level of configuration—it’s important to keep in mind that setting up Doxyen may not be as straightforward as you’d like.
Finally, because it’s possible to use comments incorrectly or omit important information when writing documentation with Doxygen, there’s always the risk that your generated documentation will be inaccurate or incomplete.
Although there are some potential drawbacks to using Doxygen, overall it’s still a great tool for documenting PHP code. If you’re looking for a tool that will save you time and provide you with multiple ways to share your code documentation, then Doxyen is definitely worth considering.