Hello mgoebel
I've been impressed with the functionality of document setup in the Rust language ecosystem .The standard Rust distribution ships with a tool called rustdoc. Its job is to generate documentation for Rust projects. Basically, Rustdoc takes as an argument either a crate (package? in ABAP) or a Markdown file, and produces HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. What is interesting to me is that the processing creates a new directory, doc, in the source with a website inside! If you open that up in a web browser, you will see structured documentation for your Rust development generated from the comments in the source code. In Rust, examples in the documentation are actually mini-Unit Tests - which are also run to ensure the documentation does reflect reality.
For quite some time now I've been thinking about something similar in the ABAP world. A program that would parse the comments in a package / function group / class / program etc and generate a web application serving the documentation. The web application and the content would be repository objects - served by the ABAP web server itself. The generated application and documentation would be transportable along with the rest of the source.
For me a compelling benefit of the approach is the documentation and the source code are not maintained separately in different systems but rather together in the one place.
One day - when I have a little more time for innovation 🙂
Regards
Andrew
