Documentation Comments

Java has support for special comments documenting types (classes and interfaces), fields (variables), constructors, and methods, hereafter referred to collectively as declared entities. The javadoc program can then be used to automatically extract these comments and generate formatted HTML pages.

A documentation comment should immediately precede the declared entity, with no blank lines in between. The first line of the comment should be simply the characters /** with no other text on the line, and should be aligned with the following declared entity. Subsequent lines consist of an asterisk, followed by a single space, followed by comment text, and aligned with the first asterisk of the first line. The first sentence of the comment text is special, and should be a self-contained summary sentence. A sentence is defined as text up to the first period that is followed by a space, tab, or newline. Subsequent sentences further describe the declared entity.