Having the Javadoc plugin embed the Javadoc tool internally is brittle, and requires manual addition of the tools.jar to the classpath. In addition, it is holding Orchid back from updating to Java 9+. This should be moved out of the Orchid plugin itself into a library that simply calls to the command-line to start the javadoc tool with a custom doclet. That doclet will product JSON of the code docs, and return that back to Orchid to turn into docs pages, just like the Kotlindoc plugin is doing currently with Dokka.
Having the Javadoc plugin embed the Javadoc tool internally is brittle, and requires manual addition of the
tools.jarto the classpath. In addition, it is holding Orchid back from updating to Java 9+. This should be moved out of the Orchid plugin itself into a library that simply calls to the command-line to start the javadoc tool with a custom doclet. That doclet will product JSON of the code docs, and return that back to Orchid to turn into docs pages, just like the Kotlindoc plugin is doing currently with Dokka.