Future of XULPlanet
We’ve been thinking a bit about the future of XULPlanet. developer.mozilla.org provides more documentation and is easier to update, both for me and for others, and also includes some of the documentation currently on XULPlanet. Due to the greater difficulty in keeping the XULPlanet version updated, this version of, for example, the tutorial, is a bit out of date.
To be honest, I haven’t updated XULPlanet documentation in quite some time, and probably won’t do much in the future. The only thing I’m likely to do is update the XPCOM reference once Firefox 3 arrives. Some developers prefer the XPCOM reference on XULPlanet instead of the MDC reference. However, the latter is created manually and is only partially complete. Perhaps someone with the time and inclination would offer to convert the XULPlanet Mozilla 1.8 XPCOM reference over to MDC. The scripts I used for this are also available.
XULPlanet at one time was quite useful, however, the time has come where its value no longer seems necessary. So at this stage, we have two options. Either find some way to make XULPlanet useful again, or remove it and have XULPlanet just redirect over to MDC.
Thoughts?
January 10th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Moving everything to MDC sounds good to me.
January 10th, 2008 at 10:41 pm
As cool as XULPlanet is, I’d rather see everything concentrated at MDC.
January 10th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Unless/until MDC has the full content, it would be good to keep the content up on XULPlanet. You could just include a prominent notice on every page that it’s no longer being updated, and that MDC is the place where new stuff is happening.
January 10th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
All, I can say is XULPlanet was an essential source for information when I was working with XUL. Since i’ve been developing Javascript/HTML for the last 2 years developer.mozilla.org has been my primary source of reference. What I recall enjoying about XULPlanet was the interface documentation. I think the new site provides similar documents, but might benefit from having an easier entry point when navigating directly to the site. XULPlanet was great because 1 click I was at an interface or entry point to an interface….
January 11th, 2008 at 12:42 am
I’m certainly in favor of getting everything into one place.
January 11th, 2008 at 3:07 am
I use XULPlanet on a regular basis to look up the references. Specicaly the Scriptable Objects reference.
I find nothing comparable on mozilla.org.
January 11th, 2008 at 8:39 am
I, as well, us XULPlanet on a nearly daily basis. When developing XUL apps, it is the site where I always come back to find good technical references. I think what I like most is when technical references are a little short on explanation, the developer guide section is a very, very good complement.
Maybe that content is already available on developer.mozilla.org and I haven’t noticed but I certainly like having one site dedicated to XUL material.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Crud, I had not seen your Perl script before. I have a pretty much complete XPIDL-file parser in Python (based on pyparsing) that groks the XPIDL grammar (mostly complete I think) and also the Doxygen/JavaDoc comments. It generates DevMo wiki markup. (It can also query MXR for the location in the tree of the IDL file, for the {{InterfaceStatus}} thingie.)
My intention was to polish it up a bit, then lob a mail to Eric Sheperd to see if it was something the documentation effort was interested in using. I figure an MIT/X11 license is suitable.
As an example, I used it to generate the nsIXULTemplateQueryProcessor wiki markup, with just some slight manual editing needed.
January 11th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Moving everything to MDC sounds good to me, but please don’t let all the links to XULPlanet suddenly become useless, and also please don’t let XULPlanet stay up with rotting content.
There are several options for the transition, but what I’d like to see is redirects setup to the appropriate MDC pages when possible, and a 404 page that does a search on MDC otherwise. A link to XULPlanet should lead to MDC as best as it can.
January 11th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
I think that XULPlanet is really out of date!!
But there are a lot of documentation that does not exists on MDC. Merging of this two resources is not a bad idea but, just shutting down the xulplanet is bad idea!!
I also think that the documentation on both resources are not complete and it is very bad that it is impossible to leave comment to ask something about tutorials.
January 11th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
It may be useful to have a list, generated by a script, that contained info or each interface:
- interface
- interface source file
- url of ref on MDC
- size (bytes) of ref on MDC
- last mod date of ref on MDC
- url of ref on XULPlanet
- size (bytes) of ref on XULPlanet
- last mod date of ref on XULPlanet
This table could then become a tool for driving and evaluating a reference transition from one site to the other.
I suggest size only because it would be retrievable via a HEAD request and would give a rough idea of what has no, some or lots of content.
January 11th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I’m a very frequent used of both MDC and XulPlanet, and at the moment I couldn’t live without either of them. MDC is still very short on XPCOM interface and component definitions, as you mentioned, and I’m surprised that there isn’t an automated update system in place.
As long as XulPlanet’s content becomes a subset of MDC, I’m all for making XulPlanet redirect to MDC. Doing a search on MDC sucks big time, though. It would be great if MDC delegated the task to Google as well.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I’m with the crowd and also use both XULPlanet and MDC regularly. The interface reference on XULPlanet is essential, but I also look there for information about XUL tags (XUL tutorial and element reference), even though that information is on MDC as well. I guess that’s because the google search on xulplanet gives much better results than the (really horrible) search at MDC. And the toc at the left of the XUL Tutorial at XULPlanet also often comes really handy for looking something up. At MDC there are only prev/next links which aren’t that useful when looking for something specifically.
January 11th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Some more info for anyone interested (sorry if this is a bad place for it):
In my Firefox trunk checkout (from a couple of days before xmas) there are 1692 interface definitions in 1324 IDL files. Category:Interfaces on DevMo has 198 articles, not all of which document a specific interface. So DevMo coverage is currently less than 2%.
My parser, after some bug-whacking, parses all but 81of the IDL files (in less than 4 minutes on my old 1.3GHz Celeron). Full coverage is doable with tweaking. And when it can parse a file, it can also generate corresponding wiki documentation according to the set interface doc template. (It has full knowledge of all parameters, attributes, modifiers since it parses the XPIDL definitions syntactically.)
January 11th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Less than 20% of course. It’s 3AM here. Bleh.
January 24th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
XULPlanet has better interface and scriptable object referrence.
And a step by step guide of XUL/XBL is pretty good to start with. I think xulplanet many need a new mechanism （for example, script converting) to keep docs updating nightly with more infomation about how to use it.
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Now I’m working on xulrunner 1.9 +, and found sometimes it just need more docs and examples to make our developers’ life easier. Let me give an example:
Is there an easy way to embedding Gecko 1.9?
Is there code snippets for those new interfaces/Components?
…
I think xulplant can finnish these things pretty well if you got spare time.
February 3rd, 2008 at 12:05 am
I prefer XULPlanet. It is easier to use.
Perhaps if XULPlanet became a XUL Wiki.
Let the users keep it up to date.
March 31st, 2008 at 5:37 pm
I always loved XULPlanet. But I am all for having all in one place. Under one premise:
All the docs from XULPlanet go to MDC and not just a subset of it. Also, please keep the emelref.xml (forgot exact name) alive and downloadable. Thanks!
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:55 am
as a non-techie, I value examples almost more important than documentation - its a way of getting started
some kind of database that maybe can suggest a list of examples?
eg how do I style the selected item in tree and listbox elements
ps big thanks for past efforts