JsDuck

API documentation generator for ExtJS 4.

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JsDuck aims to be a better documentation generator for ExtJS than the old ext-doc was.

The standard way to give some structure to the JavaDoc-style code documentation is to use HTML in doc-comments. Although the resulting documentation will look pretty, this is often achieved by sacrificing the readability of comments - HTML can get quite ugly.

JsDuck does not like it. Although it can handle comments written in HTML, it prefers a friendlier Markdown syntax:

/**
 * Basic text field.  Can be used as a direct replacement for traditional
 * text inputs, or as the base class for more sophisticated input controls
 * (like Ext.form.TextArea and Ext.form.ComboBox).
 *
 * Validation
 * ----------
 *
 * The validation procedure is described in the documentation for
 * {@link #validateValue}.
 *
 * Alter Validation Behavior
 * -------------------------
 *
 * Validation behavior for each field can be configured:
 *
 * - `{@link Ext.form.TextField#invalidText invalidText}` :
 *   the default validation message to show if any validation step above
 *   does not provide a message when invalid
 * - `{@link Ext.form.TextField#maskRe maskRe}` :
 *   filter out keystrokes before any validation occurs
 * - `{@link Ext.form.TextField#stripCharsRe stripCharsRe}` :
 *   filter characters after being typed in, but before being validated
 *
 * @xtype textfield
 */
Ext.define('Ext.form.field.Text', {
    extend: 'Ext.form.field.Base',

As you can see, JsDuck can infer several things from the code (like @class and @extends in this case), so you don't have to repeat yourself.

Getting it

Standard rubygems install should do (use the --pre switch to get the latest 2.0 version which this README documents, otherwise you will get the stable but quite old 0.6 version):

$ [sudo] gem install --pre jsduck

For hacking fork it from github:

$ git clone git://github.com/senchalabs/jsduck.git
$ cd jsduck
$ rake --tasks

JsDuck depends on json, RDiscount, and parallel; plus RSpec for tests.

If you encounter errors during gem installation, you may need to install the header files for compiling extension modules for ruby 1.8. For Debian systems you'll need the ruby1.8-dev package. For Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora use the ruby-devel package.

For Windows users out there, you can download the binary version, which includes Ruby interpreter and all dependencies bundled in a single .exe file. Grab it from the download page.

Usage

Just call it from command line with output directory and a directory containing your JavaScript files:

$ jsduck your/project/js --verbose --output your/docs

The --verbose flag creates a lot of output, but at least you will see that something is happening.

Generating Docs for ExtJS 4

For the simplest test-run just pass in the src/ dir of ExtJS 4. But to get more similar result to the official ExtJS 4 documentation, you should pass in some extra options and copy over the doc-resources directory, which contains the images referenced by the documentation:

$ jsduck ext-4.0.2a/src --output your/docs --ignore-global --exclude Error
$ cp -r ext-4.0.2a/docs/doc-resources your/docs/doc-resources

The --ignore-global will avoid the creation of a global class. The --exclude Error will ignore references to the Error class, which would otherwise result in several warnings.

Still, running JSDuck with the current ext-4.0.2a release is expected to generate a lot of warnings. These should be fixed in some later releases.

Documenting your code with JSDuck

Here's an overview of all the available @tags, and how to use them:

• Class
• Constructor
• Config options
• Properties
• Methods
• Events

Copying

JsDuck is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3.

JsDuck was developed by Rene Saarsoo, with many contributions from Nick Poulden.

Thanks to Ondřej Jirman, Thomas Aylott, johnnywengluu, gevik, ligaard, and many-many others who reported bugs, submitted patches, and provided a lot of useful input.

Changelog

• 2.0.pre4 - Fixes for the previous pre-release.

  • Paging of search results.
  • Support opening classes in tree in new tabs in IE and Firefox.
  • Include upgraded version of prettifier, fixing formatting in IE.
  • New --head-html and --body-html command line options.
  • New --local-storage-db command line option.
  • Avoid creating case-insensitively same source file names, preventing duplicate file conflicts in Windows.
  • Include missing ExtJS image files.
  • Don't exclude static members from singleton classes, simply print warning about using @static in singleton class.

• 2.0.pre3 - Bogus release, skipped.

• 2.0.pre2 - Fixes for the previous pre-release.

  • New --stdout command line option.
  • Fix opening links in new tabs.
  • Few other small bugfixes and enhancements.

• 2.0.pre - Completely overhauled Ext4-themed version.

  • A lot of changes since 0.6 releases.

• 0.6.1 - Bug fixes.

  • Fix scrolling to class members in Chrome 12.
  • Make JSDuck work with Ruby 1.8.6.
  • Upgrade the embedded ExtJS to 3.4.0.

• 0.6 - JsDuck is now used for creating the official ExtJS4 documentation.

  • Automatic linking of class names found in comments. Instead of writing {@link Ext.Panel} one can simply write Ext.Panel and link will be automatically created.
  • In generated docs, method return types and parameter types are also automatically linked to classes if such class is included to docs.
  • Support for {@img} tag for including images to documentation. The markup created by {@link} and {@img} tags can now be customized using the --img and --link command line options to supply HTML templates.
  • Links to source code are no more simply links to line numbers. Instead the source code files will contain ID-s like MyClass-cfg-style.
  • New tags: @docauthor, @alternateClassName, @mixins. The latter two Ext4 class properties are both detected from code and can also be defined (or overriden) in doc-comments.
  • Global methods are now placed to separate "global" class. Creation of this can be turned off using --ignore-global.
  • Much improved search feature. Search results are now ordered so that best matches are at the top. No more is there a select-box to match at beginning/middle/end - we automatically search first by exact match, then beginning and finally by middle. Additionally the search no more lists a lot of duplicates - only the class that defines a method is listed, ignoring all the classes that inherit it.
  • Support for doc-comments in SASS .scss files: For now, it's possible to document SASS variables and mixins.
  • Several bug fixes.

• 0.5 - Search and export

  • Search from the actually generated docs (not through sencha.com)
  • JSON export with --json switch.
  • Listing of mixed into classes.
  • Option to control or disable parallel processing.
  • Accepting directories as input (those are scanned for .js files)
  • Many bug fixes.

• 0.4 - Ext4 support

  • Support for Ext.define() syntax from ExtJS 4.
  • Showing @xtype and @author information on generated pages.
  • Showing filename and line number in warnings.
  • Fix for event showing the same doc as method with same name.

• 0.3 - Performance improvements

  • Significant peed improvements - most importantly utilizing multiple CPU-s (if available) to speed things up. On my 4-core box JsDuck is now even faster than ext-doc.
  • Printing of performance info in verbose mode
  • Support for comma-first coding style
  • Few other fixes to JavaScript parsing

• 0.2 - most features of ext-doc supported.

  • Links from documentation to source code
  • Syntax highlighting of code examples
  • Tree of parent classes
  • List of subclasses

• 0.1 - initial version.