Published 2008-05-27 00:00:00
Well, things are ticking away on the ExtJS forking project - There will be a official web site soon (I'm promised) - in the meantime head over to #roojs on freenode to see what's going on.
On the global plan, this is what I've been looking at
- I have found a copy of yui-ext 0.33, which was released under a BSD style licence, and includes all the CSS and Images. I've not got round to merging and testing it with the 1.1.1 code, but I can't see any major issues, as from my recollection 1.0 evolved from this.
- I got about halfway through adding all the javascript files (v1.1.1) to my subversion repo, along with modifying the headers to remove the licence link reference which is now irrelivant. The code can sit there until a shared repo becomes available.
- Made a dependancy list for the files (so that building specialized bundles should be easier)
- started testing a few javascript bundling tools (that work better than my simple tokenizer tool)
- Started looking at docs
The doc's turned out to be an interesting little intellectual challange, as I was not too impressed with jsdoc (the perl thing) Apart from being written in a "Write-only" language, it did not spit out anything resembling usefull docs from the extjs code.
So I started looking at jsdoc toolkit (on google code) - It's dependancies are a bit annoying (java + mozilla js engine AFAIR) - but the thing is written in javascript - (very well designed) and looks like a better bet.
My idea was to take this code, and use my dmdscript fork to run it and generate documentation without that java dependancy. My little dmdscript fork has a few benefits that make it very suited to this task - Built in File access, a built in tokenizer to start. And it's piss easy to extend.
However it turned out to be a bit more complex than that. One of the major problems turned out to be that dmdscript uses digital mars's D's regex engine, which unfortunatly is seriously feature flawed. To the point that most regex's that you give it fall over badly.
I did manage to hack in forgetfull matching (?:.....) but when I started finding quite a few more oddities, ([\s\S]+\s)? the whole task of trying to fix the code became to much, and I came to the conclusion that just ripping it out would be simpler. In it's place I've used the excellent pcre library by Phil Hazel (who also wrote one of the best MTA's out there.)
The binding code for the pcre library was already available in dsource, hidden away in the dwin project, so after understanding the API for that, I've almost got to the point where a semi modified version of jsdoctookit can parse the Code. I still need to do some more fixes to the regex engein so it can render the templates. -But it's getting there.
