A few weeks ago i started a project for grid computing called Lernea. I decided to write it in Java and using netbeans 6. Now this is a project with alot of code involved and, ofcourse, alot of documentation. For the documentation part i thought that it would be simple, easy and elegant with the auto comment tool, that i first saw back in netbeans 5 (it might have been there in 4 but i cannot remember). This was a very cool tool. All you did was open a source file and click “Tools -> Auto Comment” and a nice window would open. There you could select which method you wanted and then comment on it on a simple text box. You could also choose from the parameters and add the @param tag automaticaly. Realy nice stuff. This is long gone in netbeans 6. There was a ticket created on the netbeans tracker site. The response to this from the stuff was:
The model over the AC was running has changed in NB 6.0. Our goal is to integrate AC features more tightly to the ide within the rewrite to the new model. As a first step we implemented javadoc editor hints that permit to fix/generate javadoc in an open editor. The integration with the tasklist allowing to run javadoc hints over several files will follow but due to limited resources it will not be part of NB 6.0. We would like to add this to the autoupdate for NB 6.0 or to the next release.
This sounds logical. But i would say that since it is not implemented yet, the auto comment tool should be left alone since a big portion of the community was using it and, most of them, heavily. Moreover, i would suggest, that the tool should go over a depricated period, to give the developers some time to know the new way of commenting. This is my humble oppinion and i am looking forward (if there is such a chance) for the restoration of the tool.