When comparing Eclipse with JSDT vs ROBODoc, the Slant community recommends Eclipse with JSDT for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source documentation generators for C/C++?” Eclipse with JSDT is ranked 4th while ROBODoc is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Eclipse with JSDT is:
Eclipse with JSDT provides you with quick fixes every time a warning or error is raised by the IDE. This feature is particularly helpful at places in code where errors were caused by the programmer just being a little "lazy", such as missing out the `+` sign between two operands or a variable being out of scope.
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Pros
Pro Provides quick fixes
Eclipse with JSDT provides you with quick fixes every time a warning or error is raised by the IDE. This feature is particularly helpful at places in code where errors were caused by the programmer just being a little "lazy", such as missing out the +
sign between two operands or a variable being out of scope.
Pro Smart Code completion
Just like all other IDEs, Eclipse offers you inline code completion (even with any external JS libraries added to the project).
Pro Free and cross-platform
Eclipse runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, and is totally free of cost.
Pro Code refactoring
Eclipse's refactoring features are quite similar to Webstorm's. It provides almost the same functionalities which include renaming, moving, and member extraction to make your code tidier
Pro Code auto-completion for brackets and parenthesis
This feature is particularly useful when you've added a lot of nesting in your code and you're unable to recall which opening bracket corresponds to which closing one.
Pro Large selection of plugins
Eclipse has a large and active community, which has resulted in a wide variety of plugins.
Pro Highly customizable
Thanks to the large variety of plugins and various configuration options available, Eclipse is very customizable.
Pro Seamless integration with web servers like Apache or Jetty
Eclipse lets you integrate web servers (like Apache or Jetty) into the IDE, which you could use for in-container testing or providing services.
Pro Good integration with git using eGit plugin
Pulling, pushing, staging, stashing, etc., are all available in Eclipse as IDE functionalities.
Pro Multiple format output
ROBODoc can output the documentation in different formats (HTML, XML, DocBook, TROFF, ASCII, LaTeX or RTF).
Cons
Con Uses a lot of memory
Eclipse hogs a lot of memory, although this can be controlled by the IDE start-up ini file.
Con Plugins can be unstable
Though there are plenty of plugins to choose from, they aren't always reliable. Some aren't maintained, bug fixes can be slow, and you may need to download plugins from multiple sources.
Con Support and problem solving is difficult to find
The Eclipse forums have more tumbleweed than users. Stack-overflow also has very little info.
Con Old
The source code on GitHub has not been updated for years.
Con Requires that you do all the annotation yourself
ROBODoc requires that you do all the annotation so that the parser can derive the documentation. While other documentation generators will derive a little bit more documentation even if you don't add any annotations.
