The Firefox plugin, Ubiquity, is an awesome extendable Swiss knife command line of the web. The other day I noticed that Jack Dempsey had written a Ubiquity command for searching the Ruby documentation from APIdock. After quick googling, I found out that different people had done the same for Rails and RSpec as well, based on Jack’s command. Talk about community effort! Here are links to the Ubiquity commands (you need to have Ubiquity installed):

• Rails
• Ruby
• RSpec

APIdock 1.4 (IRON STEVE) was deployed a few minutes ago. The release consists of mostly bug fixes and some minor stuff.

The docs for the new Ruby on Rails 2.3.2 with Rack and Metal and all kinds of other awesomeness are being imported as I’m writing this. Check the new docs here.

Update: RSpec 1.2 was just imported as well. To the docs

In addition to all kinds of general Ruby fame, Dr. Nic is the creator and maintainer of the Ruby on Rails Textmate bundle. Now, it seems that just a few hours ago he noticed that our Ville Lautanala aka Lautis had written a few good bugfixes and changes to the bundle. He then went ahead and merged them to the master branch.  And the real kicker here is, that among those changes was the change that adds APIdock-powered documentation macros. Let’s hope that this change sticks so all Rails codin’ Textmate users will be able to enjoy the rich documentation browsing that APIdock provides.

Will the Ruby bundle, which is also maintained by Dr. Nic, follow next?

Update: Origin of the bundle can be changed using following commands:

% cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Textmate/Bundles/Ruby\ On\ Rails.tmbundle
% git remote rm origin
% git remote add -f -t master -m master origin git://github.com/drnic/ruby-on-rails-tmbundle.git

First came Vim, and next Gaizka added APIdock integration to Emacs. Now perhaps the biggest favorite of most Ruby and Rails developers, myself included: Textmate! Courtesy of one of Nodeta’s own, Ville Lautanala aka Lautis, you can get the Textmate bundles with APIdock goodness for Ruby and Rails from github with just a couple of simple git commands:

Now, the keyboard shortcut

gets you the page for the current word from APIdock.

I’m a vim user myself, and I was very happy to find that the guys at Akita On Rails had put together a small vim helper that allows you to jump directly to the APIdock page of the given Rails keyword. You can find it from their Github dotfiles commit.

Keep these contributions coming. :)

UPDATE: There’re now emacs bindings available as well.

UPDATE 2: One of our own guys also implemented a TextMate command.

I just finished importing Ruby 1.8.7 to APIdock. It’s also the new default version, because usually it is better documented. However, there’re some incompatibilities between 1.8.6 and 1.8.7, so be sure to check the older documentation when something seems to be wrong.

Wohoo, Rails 2.2 is finally here. I just finished importing it to APIdock, so go and enjoy the fresh and improved documentation.

Unfortunately there was a nasty bug left in the 1.1 release: as many of you noticed, methods ending with ? had a caching issue. It’s now fixed, along with some other method name matching bugs.

Please let us know if you encounter any other problems with the new release.

I just deployed APIdock 1.1, a maintenance release. It features some bug fixes, mostly in RDoc rendering and handling of funny method names.

It’s nice to see so many notes being posted, keep up the good work. :)

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.