As the Rails documentation discourse is really bubbling, our schedule has given us the sweet chance of taking a few steps back and let us concentrate on the first release of APIdock.
APIdock will be deployed today and we’ll import different versions of the included projects slowly for the next couple of days. The app will be completely usable during the version roll-out. Here are some of the most important changes from Rails-Doc.
Multiple projects
The most important difference of APIdock in relation to Rails-doc is of course multiple projects. You will be able to surf your way to APIdock.com and search and browse Ruby and RSpec documentation (in addition to Rails) with the same (except for the improvements that we’ve made) interface that you have been able to use in Rails-Doc. To begin with, the newest patch level of Ruby 1.8.6 will be included as we slowly roll older versions in. Ruby 1.9 will follow later if there proves to be a demand for it. Users wont yet be able to add their own projects, but we’ll provide an easy way to suggest new ones to be added.
In this first release, all the included projects will be listed in tabs, but later on when more projects are added, the idea is that users will be able to choose their “favorite” projects that will be shown as tabs. This way the app will be custom-made for each user.
We’ve added some project specific stuff like extensive project details and version history of the added versions. Behind the curtains the importing of new versions is done with a web interface.
Cross-project searching
When developing Rails applications, you are often faced with situations where you can’t be completely sure, whether a certain method comes from Ruby or Rails or somewhere else (like RSpec when writing tests). To help with this situation, in APIdock, after you have filled in a search term, you can simply click on another project to get the results for that same search term from that other project.
Moderators
We have also made our ACL more complex under the hood. We can now have moderators that have some extra rights like editing other users’ notes. This way we can give moderator rights to other people including some of our most active collaborators. If you’re interested in becoming a moderator, please contact us at team@apidock.com.
Rails-Doc => APIdock migration
Your Rails-Doc accounts will be preserved in APIdock, the notes will be where you wrote them and the thanks you’ve got won’t disappear either. Any URIs to the rails-doc.org domain will redirect to the correct page under apidock.com. There aren’t any drawbacks to the migration – no functionality is lost. The app was designed to support multiple projects right from the get-go and now that decision is paying off.
APIdock: what’s to come?
Rails-doc and APIdock has been our first Summer on Rails project, something we hope to be an annual feat. The general idea behind SOR is to hire young
talented developers to develop something cool and not-too-business-critical over the summer under the mentorship of some senior developers. We think
APIdock is a pretty awesome result and huge thanks go to our team of emerging Rails superstars:
- Hannu Pelkonen
- Jyri Tuulos
- Ville Lautanala
who did a great job even when the so-called mentors were often nowhere to be found. :)
The summer is starting to be over and that means the super-active development cycle of APIdock will slow down. We will continue to maintain the app, fix any bugs that are found and concentrate only on absolute key features.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy this first installment of APIdock. In any case, let us know what you think.
Just to say, great new release – I’m really liking the multiple projects.
Although I would like to be able to:
– Search all the project at once (although this might be too much overhead)
– Have spaces converted to underscores when searching – so ‘has many’ == ‘has_many’
– Search the list using a quicksilver-esque algorithm (http://orderedlist.com/articles/live-search-with-quicksilver-style-for-jquery). So ‘habtm’ matches ‘has_and_belongs_to_many’
But otherwise the site is great.
Enjoying your application quite a bit. I have a request though. Put back the big honking search field you used to have, please! I hate using the small one on the side.
rails-doc.org should redirect to apidock.com/rails instead of apidock.com
(Accidentally posted this comment into another post in the archive before)
Nice. Could you still make rails-doc.org reference to apidock.com/rails, as it would be a bit smoother to be able to make searches straight from the main page?
I have a few observations:
- Some special methods, such as Array#-, Array#* are not accessible. I think it’s due to url escape. Please check.
- Can we distinguish deprecated (should not be used) from deleted (not available anymore in new version) items?
Impressive release. Now it rocks any other doc tool ever written.
As I am a spoiled brat (my last comment begged for multi project / multi version support :D), I’m gonna beg again:
* Could we have the categories in the “Related Methods” columns made collapsible (usually I want to look at instance methods, and they are far down).
* The versions bar graph is great, but I’d love to have a mean to see what changed since the last version (I know a full diff viewer is not trivial but we could make with another collapsible panel like “Show Source” with a messy detail of the changes or something like that).
* #nav_search { position: fixed; } :D
This last one I’m already hacking around, but other may like it too. The first one could also be hackable (although I’m a jQuery guy, would need a little research to pull it off).
Thanks for this wonderful contribution.
P.S. When Rails started, one of the things which were criticized was its documentation. Over the last month I worked in a project using Java + Hibernate + Tapestry5 (IoC + web), and can tell you, Ruby and Rails documentation, blogs and forums (and now API Dock) certainly beat the hell out of anything they can offer… particularly in terms of integration (alright, officially T5 is not released yet but it has been extremely stable for more than a year).
nachokb
We want merb!
MERB ! MERB ! MERB ! MERB !
:)
Congratulations guys. APIDock *really* rocks.
Hi,
I work on multiple versions of ruby on different projects. I used to search rails 2.0.2 with this url (firefox location bar keyword search):
http://rails-doc.org/rails/v2.0.2/search?query=%s
I now get an error (including if I sub rails-doc.org for apidock.com)
Can you please enable some form for GET url for searching multiple version for rails.
Thanks
This is great thanks! Can we have the rspec-rails docs as well please? Thats where all the “.should redirect_to(..)” and “.should have_tag(..)” stuff is defined.
Another big thanks for this great project! Since you said you’ll add Ruby 1.9 if there’s interest, I wanted to publicly express interest. Even adding Ruby 1.8.7 could be helpful. Keep up the good work!