I really like the documentation generated by Code Illuminated, but I don’t like the inline documentation format, which has to look something like this:

// ** {{{ App.addMenuItem() }}} **
//
// Adds a menu item to the {{{element}}} DOM node showing the {{{label}}}
// text.  If {{{urlOrCallback}}} is an URL, choosing the item causes a new
// window to be opened with that URL.  If it's a function, it will be called
// when choosing the item.
//
// If the node does not have a menu yet, one will be created.

I think this renders the inline documentation unreadable. Natural Docs has a lot nicer format that would look like this:

/*
  Function: App.addMenu

  Adds a menu item to the element DOM node showing the label
  text.  If urlOrCallback is an URL, choosing the item causes a new
  window to be opened with that URL.  If it's a function, it will be called
  when choosing the item.

  If the node does not have a menu yet, one will be created.
*/

So I took Code Illuminated and made half of it into a PHP script so it wasn’t limited to same-domain ajax calls. I also added a very basic Natural Docs parser and a Markdown parser, code highlighting courtesy of GeSHi, and caching. Here’s a demo. It’s nothing special right now and needs a lot more work. In particular, I need a full-fledged Natural Docs parser in PHP. Anyone have one handy?

Is anyone interested in this? I’ll be using it for JibberBook documentation, but I don’t know if I’ll release it unless there’s an interest in it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under scripts and tagged with code-illuminated, documentation, generator, geshi, php. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.