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.

Our planned schedule and features held! Rails API documentation with versions support! Full search! OpenId support! Gravatarrrrs! Check it out!

Or install the Firefox Search plugin rrrright here and fire up that cracker!

Seriously though, the deployment was delayed by a small surge of bugs found right before the intended deployment window, so we are about 20 hours late. It took about four hours because of all the version-specific documentation generation. We are sorry for any inconveniences you may have experienced and we hope you’ll enjoy this installment of Rails-doc.

Today it’s become clear that Rails-doc 2.0 will be released in under two weeks, the current target being on 17 July. We’ve got a lot of stabilizing work ahead of us, all planned out for the next two weeks. The 2.0 release will include some vital features, the most important of them being…

Versions!

That’s right. It’s the feature that makes or breaks an app like Rails-doc. It’s the feature that has broken most apps like Rails-doc and it’s the feature that will make Rails-doc. In Rails-doc, you won’t have to choose which version’s documentation you want to browse or search, but instead you can view an older version of a certain method or class simply by clicking your favored version from our version time line. The time line features a visualization of the changes that have been made to that specific class or method. You can still find stuff that has been removed in newer versions and in fact we indicate deprecated methods and classes everywhere we list them.

Full text search and Firefox search plugin

We have implemented a full text search to complement our current lightning fast keyword search. If the keyword search runs dry, or if you simply prefer to, you can use the full text search that searches from the entire documentation plus notes that all of You have posted.

We’ve also wrapped up an awesome Firefox search plugin that uses both searches and produces a real power search. It’s a combined I’m-feeling-lucky and keyword search. What it does, is it puts you to the page that was retrieved as a first hit from the full text search and also fills your query to the keyword search so you get the best hit and the hits from the keyword search at once. If the first hit was the one you wanted you can just start browsing – a click anywhere on the page will hide the keyword search results. If you didn’t get lucky, check out the keyword results. And if they don’t have what you’re looking for, a simple press of the return key will take you to the full search results. This power search can be used by simple URLs so you can even link to them.

Other new features

• A dashboard for logged in users
• OpenId support
• Gravatars!
• Included In list for modules
• Tons of minor improvements

Probably the number one feature request we’ve gotten is that we would do to the Ruby API what Rails-doc has done to Rails API. We are not going to mix Ruby into Rails-doc, but we’ll be using Ruby as the primary pilot project when we first begin with APIdock.

Rails-doc.org 1.1 has just been deployed. It features:

• a revised front page with latest good notes
• search improvements
• fixes to some cache problems
• other minor fixes

We had a good first weekend and we are now getting a steady few thousand daily users. However, we still need more registered users to post more notes. I want to again thank Fabio Cevasco, who interviewed me and wrote an early review on Rails-doc. We also got noticed on Rails Inside and a dozen other blogs. Thanks to all who posted about us!

We got loads of nice and encouraging e-mails from users. We try to answer them as quickly as we can. Thanks for all the feedback!

Here is some proof to back up our overly lengthy tagline, Rails-doc is the first Rails documentation app that wasn’t developed by one guy in his underpants. Rails-doc.org has an actual team behind it – a team that employs an agile development process.

There’s hardly a better visualization of Scrum than a timelapse video! It shows the progress of our second sprint.

As of right now Rails-doc.org website is opened. There isn’t much content yet, but a lot of promises, including the first release which is scheduled for next week, current target being Thursday, June 19th. Rails-doc is a community powered Ruby on Rails documentation app. It is open and social. It features an intelligent keyword search that is almost as fast as the native search in your browser. We have two clear goals, the second depending on the first:

1. To provide a highly usable interface for perusing Rails documentation and for contributing with notes and examples and to thus collect a good amount of additional Rails documentation.
2. To expand the actual documentation of Rails by providing tools to active members of the Rails-doc community for incorporating the notes into creating an extended unified improved documentation.

The first release will be the fruit of three sprints’ work from our core Rails-doc development team consisting of three active members and a few of much less active ones. Rails-doc.org is also the pilot project for APIdock, Nodeta’s new social software documentation app.

Many others have tried to develop a Rails documentation app, but none have succeeded. Regardless of that, I know that…

…we indeed can do it!

Check it out!

Ruby on Rails documentation sucks. Somehow the convention over configuration idiom translated into intuition over information. It’s not easy to learn Ruby on Rails with the API documentation on your screen and a glimmering pin-up photo of David in your hand. If you are a Rails beginner, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re a Rails veteran, you might have to think back a little: remember when you saw that dynamic scaffolding screencast and dug head first into the new, forever changed world of web development? All those amazing innovations amidst all those inexplicable hash parameters with such descriptive names as options or args.

The bad API documentation was never just bad for the Rails community. First of all it garnered some really good books. A lot of writers wanted to be the first to write that Rails and Ruby bible. These were ambitious, excited writers, which is a hell of a lot better than your average commissioned Joe writing about Symbian or Spring or something.

Secondly, the lack of a good API documentation created a lot of frustration in the beginners’ minds and every single Rails beginner who plowed through that struggle also went through the period of releasing that frustration. I’m talking about those moments when they relied on that convention (and intuition) and felt the hand of David guiding them and, on a mere hunch, wrote something they had never seen anywhere, and it worked – it actually friggin’ worked. Those moments made these people hard core Rails fanatics who never looked back.

Well, the buzz is over and it’s time for a reality check: rails documentation sucks. It still sucks! And it’s not getting better. So we at Nodeta decided to do something about it. It’s time to truly harness the power of the community to improve the documentation. In the age of Rails, that can only mean one thing: a killer app. That’s why we are whipping up a summer project of our own, to create Rails-Doc, the community driven Rails documentation app. The idea came already almost a year ago and the final decision was made a couple of months ago. Since the idea emerged, we have been blessed with some competition and an amazing starting point. Most plans have already been made: the project will start in mid-May and the first release will be out by the end of June. Stay tuned for updates on Rails-Doc.