Monday 21 July 2008

Rails doc 2.0

Finally some decent documentation for rails!

Like a number of rails enthusiats, I read Jeremy's blog post with a bit of trepidation. Mainly about the decline of rails blogging, it also points out the distinct lack of decent documentation for Rails... and firmly points a finger at all of us for not contributing to making it better. The worrying point is the conclusion that rails will decline in popularity due to a lack of available, comprehensive documentation.

Luckily, Rob Anderton has put my fears to rest. Rob's post has pointed me at the new Rails doc project. I've only just begun to investigate the site, but I can already tell it's far more useful than the standard Rails API I've been relying upon.

For one thing, it links the documentation to the version of rails you're using. This alone would have saved me a few hours of annoyance trying to get a method to accept parameters that are only available in a more current version than what's on our production server. :P

It also has a really neat keyword-search interface that prompts you with reasonable guesses, and a way for the community to add to the documentation (yay)!

All in all, it shows a lot of potential. So lets get cracking on building the doco up to a standard that developers in other languages have come to expect.

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