MakeDoc automates what programmers dislike doing

Nowadays the large and middle companies have to solve the problem with heterogeneous IT environment, with number of systems that were implemented during the IT department existence, according to the needs, usually by different IT directors with different IT strategies (various platforms preference). This kind of problem is solved by SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) concept and most of the IT largest companies offer services and solutions in the field of integration, which is the general known term for this field.

One of the important players in the field of software oriented architecture is the US company TIBCO Software Inc. It focuses on concepts of integration for more than 20 years. Palo Alto (CA) is the headquarter of the company and it has over twenty offices worldwide - North Americe, Europe, Asia, middle East, Africa and South America. Its' products belong to family of integration tools, middleware that allows communication among different part of IT system or ensures connection among providers, distributors and customers. Generally the middleware software is understood as a necessary part of a business cycle. TIBCO Company is the leader in the field of business process management and business integration software. For more than 2500 companies all around the world is TIBCO synonym for extreme performance, scalability and reliability. Significant customers of TIBCO are 47 „world´s top" e.g. Delta Air Lines, FedEx, Telecom Italia and more.

The biggest team of TIBCO platform specialists in Czech Republic has PIKE ELECTRONIC that is TIBCO Partner since 2003 and in 2008 become TeamTIBCO Partner. The company has more than 50 certified professionals that have long time experiences with design, development, testing, implementation and support of the TIBCO projects on the customer´s side. Not only for long time experiences with TIBCO environment, but also because of meeting customer´s needs every day, PIKE ELECTRONIC helps to solve its' business partners their problems and cooperate on the mutual growth.

Benefits of well-done documentation for development, testing and operation environment of any size are indubitable nowadays. Such documentation saves time during every project phase and lowers the total cost. Nevertheless the documentation is often rated as a disciplinary matter and its manual writing is not in favor by programmers as much as it is required.

One of the significant products of PIKE ELECTRONIC that company developed for customer´s needs is documentation solution for TIBCO environment - MakeDoc. Development of this unique software was based on the needs of our customers that were looking for a tool that would automatically generate documentation, since manual writing takes too long and is not popular. Orientation in manual written documentation is difficult and requires very profound knowledge of the environment. There is also high probability of mistyping and troubles with versioning which complicates the usage.

Nowadays PIKE ELECTRONIC evaluates new version of MakeDoc. MakeDoc is a tool that automatically generates documentation for TIBCO environment. It provides documentation in HTML, PDF and CHM outputs, that means documentation you can easily read in web browser (and it is hyperlinked), printable with support for Windows environment. Documentation is hyperlinked that means browsing in it is native and easy. Generation of documentation can also be run as a batch process (for example during the night, when it will have no effect on server performance).

Generated documentation has following parts:

• Project part - provides detailed and complex information about documented projects. It includes project description and details of every single process, diagram, schema, global variable, used archive, communication protocols and XML Mapper activity description.
• Cross-reference part - documents communication among various destinations, projects and also documents usage of global variables in different projects. User can display two points of view - point of view from one project (to see all related destinations) and from point of view of one destination (and activities related to one project). It works similar with global variables.
• Repository Analyst - helps to ensure better control over project. Snapshot comparison gives exact picture of progress of project during the timeline as well as it shows the version differences which is useful during solving bug and error troubles.
• Output code quality control - well-arranged summary where is the list of all broken references, comparison between code and standards, warnings when description field is not filled as well as project part descriptions.

This product has been positively accepted by the customers as well as by the TIBCO company ever since its release. This unique documentation software was already presented and awarded several times on prestige TIBCO User Conference, which is held every year in the USA. MakeDoc is perceived very well by the significant customers in the USA and by the rest of the world as well. The Product is also successful on the Czech market, where it was nominated for "Crystal disk" award during the INVEX 2008 trade fair.