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FAQ

Goal

ESDoc has two goals. The first goal is reducing the cost to write an documentation, it is able to continuously maintenance. The second goal is without looking the source code of a library, it is to be able to use the library.

In order to achieve this two goals, ESDoc produces a practical document, measures the coverage, integrates the test code and more.

Difference between ESDoc and JSDoc

JSDoc is most popular JavaScript API Documentation tool. ESDoc is inspired by JSDoc.

  • ESDoc
    • supports ES6
    • targets at ES6 class and import/export style
    • generates detailed document
    • measures document coverage
    • associates test code to document.
    • is slower than JSDoc(I want to improve it)
  • JSDoc
    • supports ES3/ES5 (JSDoc 3.3.0 will support ES6)
    • targets Class-base OOP and Prototype-base OOP
    • has many flexible document tags

Supported Languages

ESDoc supports ES6(ECMAScript-262 6th, ES2015).

The languages below are not supported.

  • ES3, ES5: Use JSDoc
  • ES7: Because ES7 is not stable. However, ESDoc ES7 Plugin experimentally supports to ES7.
  • Alt-JS(TypeScript, CoffeeScript, Dart, etc...): Because supporting them is too hard.

Supported Environment

ESDoc supports Node.js(v0.12)

Import Path In Documentation

ESDoc displays the import path of class/function into the document. However, the import path may be different from real import path because usually ES6 is transpiled to use it.

So, ESDoc Import Path Plugin converts import path to real import path.

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