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Docet is a powerful online document manager coinceived with the goal of making it easy to create multi-package online help into existing JavaEE Web applications. One of the main goal that has been driving Docet development is to provide a simple integration into existing applications so as to focus right away on designing and writing your online documentation.

Additionally, when it comes to writing online guides, Docet is also a language, based on an html-like syntax, as such pretty easy to grasp and exploit via existing tools and IDEs. Accordingly, guides are collections of html files that, after undergoing a validation and a subsequent parsing stage via a provided Maven plugin, are organized in so-called documentation packages: these are simple zip files, containing any necessary page and media resource (currently png images only) along with a pre-compiled index to support text searches. Packages can then be unzipped and "registered" via a locator service to the Docet engine which, upon request, will be able to process a requested page and provide a version suitable to be rendered as an actual Web page or being exploited as a part of a pdf document: in both cases parsing a page is a complete runtime process starting upon request.

Summarizing Docet is both a (i) Java engine for serving online documentation and a (ii) language for writing documents as well, along with the tools needed for validating and generating pre-processed documentation packages.