Hi everyone,
First and foremost, if your instructions state "javadoc style comments must be used for each element of the public interface of each class" then you must write them in your assignment. If you do not you will fail. Simple.
Of course where you don't have anything extra to add to a comment for a class or method that you can inherit from, Javadoc has the ability to
explicitly state that you are inheriting comments. I used this extensively in my project - it saved me from writing a whole lot of redundant comments, and it made it explicit to someone reading my code where the real comments would come from.
You should also note that you only
have to write Javadoc for your public methods and classes. I would still write Javadoc for the other classes and methods - it looks nicer in the assignment (plus with many IDEs creating simple Javadoc there is no reason not to), however it means you do not have to agonize over getting the "perfect" Javadoc comments for non public classes and methods. So if you set appropriate accessibility on your classes (does your GUI code need access to
every class in your network code, if not what access should some of your network classes be. Does your network code need access to
every class in your server? If not can change the access levels of some of your server classes / methods? ...) you can avoid some of the heartaches.
Jumping away from the assignment, you might be interested in the Extreme Programming take on comments in general (basically: don't do it). Unless you are writing an API that will be used externally, few people will need the Javadoc. And if you are writing good class names / method names then the Javadoc can be redundant. If you need a lot of comments, then that might imply that your code could be rewritten to make it easier to understand (another XP mantra: refactor often). Finally, comments just get out of date (ironically, this was a reason
for Javadoc: try to keep documentation with the code so that it has less chance of getting out of date :roll: ).
Regards, Andrew