At the Javadoc BOF at JavaOne we spent about a half hour collecting
feature requests from users. At the end, I went through the list
and had people vote. (There were about 25 developers present, plus
about 12 Java Software employees. Only about half the developers
voted.) I did not prompt them for any of our "favorite" requests.
Here's what they came up with.

(Roger, the JavaHelp request is at the bottom)

VOTES

 14 Tag listener interface - This would make it simple to add
      new tags that Javadoc doesn't know about. All you would
      have to do is write a listener class that tells how to
      deal with the new tag. (Suggested by Steve Lewis, who
      gave the Warnlet/Codelet BOF.)
      
      Submitted as 4282805: Add tag listener interface for custom tags

      IMPLEMENTED! Implemented in 1.4.0 as -tag and -taglet options

 14 Add a tag that copies the doc comment from a superclass
      into the current doc comment. This allows developers to
      write around the copied text rather than have that be the
      only text. Currently, text is copied only if the comment
      is empty. I explained this is the current behavior
      before asking them to vote for this tag, to ensure they
      were voting for the tag, not simply the inheritance feature.
      (Developer suggested @super as name for tag)
      
      Submitted as 4186639: Inherit documentation with @inheritDoc tag

      IMPLEMENTED! Implemented in 1.4.0 as {@inheritDoc} tag

 13 @exclude tag to hide packages, classes, or members.
      Important to be able to override this on the command line
      for internal documentation.

      Submitted as 4058216: Capability to exclude classes/members
                            (e.g. RMI stubs and skeletons)
      which had been proposed as @docset, but withdrawn as promoting
      poor programming practices.

      IMPLEMENTED by third party as yDoc Doclet, which lets you
      exclude program elements from documentation
      
  9 Method grouping or categorizing, with an @group or @category
      tag. Use UML markup. Allow programmers to create their own
      groups, for example: "important"
      
      Submitted as two RFE's:
      4085608: Add member categories (@category) so paramater
         can link to constants
      4287701: Add member categorization to group members in documentation

      Not yet implemented. Is committed to 1.5.0 (as of Dec 2002)

  4 Include ability to get source code from the Doclet API.

      Submitted as 4192783: Expose file/line/column of declarations
      with SourcePosition
      and 1242492: Add links to source code, using -src option
      
      IMPLEMENTED! Implemented in 1.4.0

These are the only feature requests we voted on. In addition...

One developer complained that IDEs don't support Javadoc,
and others seemed to agree. I understood this to mean
that the IDEs don't allow for easy creation, editing and
display of doc comments in code that developers write.
(Perhaps we could do more to encourage IDEs to support this.
Later, I went to the Visual Cafe booth, and they showed me how
the version released in December does have a javadoc editor,
so there is some support out there.)

  Action item for IDEs, not Sun.

One developer ask to be able to call Javadoc as a method --
to be able to pre-initialize the static variables and return
rather than call system exit. I believe Atul told him
the system exit problem was fixed. Is the static variables
problem fixed?

  IMPLEMENTED! Various overloads of execute() method exist
  (unsure of version they were added)

One person asked about the localization doclets that John Wegis
worked on.

  We make this available to those who ask.

A developer said (and others agreed) they get incomprehensible
errors every time they run javadoc 1.2. We asked them to send us
the particulars as bug report so we could at least give them
more intelligent messages.

  IMPLEMENTED! As of 1.4.0, every error message contains the
  file and line number of the error.

Someone said that we should check the HTML in doc comments,
because bad HTML would prevent pages from being generated.
Atul and I contested that that could happen, and asked
them to submit such bugs.

  No action taken (or needed?)

One developer wants to include their own custom command line options.
There is no documentation on how to do this, and he thought it
not possible. Atul explained it required implementing setOptions.
This was one example of how we need to better document doclets
to encourage wider doclet programming.

  IMPLEMENTED! Documented in 1.3 in Doclet Overview page

One person wants to write his own doclet to create BeanInfo classes.
He was happy to write it, but felt our examples could be better.
(We have an internal BeanInfo doclet -- perhaps Atul could clean
it up and we could release it as an example.)

  COMMITTED to 1.5.0 as
  4638723: Refactor to maximize shared code for doclets emulating the stddoclet

One person asked for a -javahelp command line option to the javadoc
command that causes the JavaHelp indexes to be generated, rather
than be a separate operation. This would allow anyone who has
downloaded JavaHelp API to view our docs in JavaHelp.

  SUBMITTED as
  4395780: Add -javahelp option to generate JavaHelp documentation

-Doug