Hello,

It’s been awhile since I have posted but…

I have been in the laboratory cooking up some futuristic solutions to the everyday problem of component documentation.

Take a look at the screenshot below, click on it to maximize to see the full image. This is DocumentFXExplorer. What you are looking at is the new revolutionary way of getting to know TEOComponents. Current and future customers of Teoti Graphix will be delighted to see that our number ONE goal is to perfect component documentation.

The screen shot shows a FULL Flex 2 user interface that (for now) mirrors Adobe’s ASDoc’s to a T. What you may have not know is that all of our documentation since the Alpha release of Flex 2 is created by DocumentFX, not the ASDoc command line tool. The documenter is actually the application called DocumentFX, the image is the DocumentFXExplorer.

BTW, this screen shot is the ASDoc module, not to be confused with the actual DocumentFXExplorer application. This module has been loaded from the main view.

What is the difference?

DocumentFX is the AS3 engine, project manager, file manager, analyzer, renderer… etc. It produces all our docs, publishes zip files and even ftps zips to our server for updates.

DocumentFXExplorer is the User Interface that our customers will use to learn about our components, save book marks to methods, properties, create live doc comments and even run our examples right inside the UI right next to the element descriptions!

They will see updates to the API, current notices, and much more. The majik of the explorer is DocumentFX has a render mode that creates an XML representation of all classes, interfaces and package structures so that the explorer just loads XML. Yup, the image you see is just XML nothing more.

If you look at our web site and see the HTML asdoc’s you can see another output and that is HTML. The explorer can create live flowcharts of the class-interface hierarchies(Package Trees) and a variety of other kewl stuff that will help expedite learning.

The explorer will also have a wiki plug-in, forum board(Flex 2 style) and any other applications my fellow devs can think of. This is going to turn into a central hub for Flex 2 learning in the future also. The power of this paradigm cannot be matched in development time with AJAX and HTML. Apollo will help because I can integrate HTML rich text views and get the best of both worlds.

Eventually, I plan on either making this an online service to unite fellow component developer(some type of unified store) or turn it into an Apollo application. Or, so both of the previously mentioned.

Another great thing is this explorer will showcase our many user interface, dnd, windows ,manager components in it’s own user interface~! How kewl is that.

Since I used heavy composition, I can see this eventually creating documentation for any language you want. Just create a plug-in module for say javascript and since we use polymorphic interface calls, vola, a new parser!

Teoti Graphix is also on the verge of releasing some fantastic new component sets, so stayed tuned. The blog has been a ghost town of late but, that will soon change.

Peace, Mike

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 3:18 pm and is filed under flex2. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.