While comments are certainly an important part of code documentation, and become much appreciated later on during maintenance and support phases of an application, they can be quite tedious to write, particularly in cases where you are documenting the obvious. In some situations you may be able to get away without writing comments for these types of methods, but in some situations your IDE or Javadoc report may still flag those methods as missing Javadoc comments and so it’s best to put them in anyway.

JAutodoc is a super Eclipse plugin for assisting you with writing comments. It comes with customizable method prefix mappings to comment phrases. For example, if your method begins with ‘add’ the phrase ‘Adds the’ will be placed in the comment. Thus, if the method name was ‘addEmployee’ the comment text would be ‘Adds the employee’. If the method were ‘isActive’, the method text becomes ‘Checks if is active’. All of the mappings are customizable from the plugin properties.

It can be set to use the Eclipse comment formatter, to replace the existing Javadoc or to complete it, as well as optionally add a todo annonation to it for future review. It fills out all the parameters passed and return parameters as well.

You can highlight an individual method and right click and choose JAutodoc from the menu, or select the entire source of the class and complete all the javadocs. It saves a lot of time getting the skeleton of your javadoc comments in place, allowing you to focus your commenting time and energy on writing meaningful descriptions where necessary.

To read more about the plugin and download it, see the JAutodoc web site.

Tripbase is a travel site with an interesting Ajax interface. The site is designed to help the user find travel destinations according to their preferences and interests. For the Ajax interface, sliders are first provided allowing the user to set the type of destination they are looking for, by weighing their preferences on Nightlife, Dining, Shopping, Nature, and Attractions. After that initial selection is done, a list of top suggestions is presented on the page, and further preference customizations are given, including the dates and duration you want to travel, where you are departing from, your preferred weather, your budget, the type of trip you are looking for, the continents you are interested in, and if you want to travel in a high or low tourist season.

As you adjust the preferences on the left, the suggestions update live on the right side of the screen. In this section, it shows one photo of the suggested destination, and shows the cost per day and the population, with a link for more information.

When you click for more information on any of the suggestions, a window appears over the results with the detail information. The detail window shows the temperature, tourist season and rainfall for the period of travel indicated; has photos, and links to articles; a list of things to do, dining, nightlife, lodging, shopping, nature, and then has links to search for flights or hotels (using a different web site).

The interface is easy to use and was very responsive on my laptop using Firefox 2.