Hi Rod,
You probably have an statement in your instructions similar to:
You are permitted to use any IDE tool you choose, but you must not submit any code that is not your own work. The final program must have no dependencies on any libraries other than those of the Java 2 Platform.
(My highlighting)
The Java Help System API is not something you have written (or is it?
), and it is not part of the core Java 2 Platform, so you cannot use it.
The other idea I had was to create simple HTML files and interact over them in order to provide a simple help system. Is it enough?
That's what I did.
However you may not necessarily have to go so far - you may find that just providing the HTML help files may meet the requirements without your program needing to interact with them. You will have to check your instructions for that.
Regards, Andrew