I thought it'll be nice to blog about this before the Documentation Hackfest was started.
I am quite frustrated with the current situation with regards the API reference browsing experience in the GObject world, some of the problems are these:
- I can't quickly get a compact overview of all the properties, methods and signals of a given class
- On top of that, I need to open each super-class or interface page separately to know which properties are inherited from those
- I can't figure out all functions/methods use a given class as an argument or return type, or which classes use it as a property.
- People can't add comments or code samples to each struct/class/method/…
- People can't easily suggest amendments to the documentation without diving into the code and generating a patch + a bug in bugzilla.
On top of that, usability wise I'm not too happy with the current web frontend and/or devhelp. The information to figure out all these things are all in GIR files, so I gave it a thought and figured out what's needed. Turns out we are not too far.
So I've been developing GDN (GNOME Development Network) a little django app hosted in github using kamstrup's giraffe. which takes GIR files and dumps them into static HTML code. The GIR parsing stuff is quite clever and useful, but we need a dynamic app if we want to provide some of the most interesting features, so I'm ussing giraffe's AST to dump all the cross referenced information into an SQL database.
So far I've managed to dump most info, the Django data model is pretty much done, I need to fix some bugs with regards to resolving specific types while crawling the parameters and return.
You need to install my personal giraffe's branch for now until Mikkel comes back from vacation and if you want it to work as I've been adding some missing features to the AST code.
So far I only have backend code no frontend code at all. Stay tuned for more info on this, and if anyone is willing to help make sure you send me an email to aruiz at gnome dot org
Silicon Island 