Rubybrain.com

[Zoop Zoop]

I am really confused by rubybrain.com.
I like the interface much more than the ruby-doc.org documentation, Ajax
makes it much more responsive.
But somehow I could never find what I was searching for and ended up
looking somewhere else.
Just some minutes ago I wanted to look up Ruby's String methods... not
such an unusual task one might think.
Searching for the String class led me here:
http://www.rubybrain.com/api/ruby-1.8.6/doc/index.html?a=C00000226&name=String
But where are the instance methods?
The ruby-doc.org docs have them:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html

Someone please tell me what I do wrong (with the optional hint that I am
stupid)!

 

[Luis Lavena]

I am really confused by rubybrain.com.
I like the interface much more than the ruby-doc.org documentation, Ajax
makes it much more responsive.
But somehow I could never find what I was searching for and ended up
looking somewhere else.
Just some minutes ago I wanted to look up Ruby's String methods... not
such an unusual task one might think.
Searching for the String class led me here:http://www.rubybrain.com/api/ruby-1.8.6/doc/index.html?a=C00000226&na...
But where are the instance methods?
The ruby-doc.org docs have them:http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html

Someone please tell me what I do wrong (with the optional hint that I am
stupid)!

Do not NoobKit [1] also work for you?

I don't know about these projects, each one implements the search and
documentation functionality quite differnt.

[1] http://www.noobkit.com

HTH,

 

[Zoop Zoop]

Do not NoobKit [1] also work for you?

Thanks, Luis, I'm gonna try that!

Anyhow, does anybody else have any idea why Rubybrain.com does not
contain instance methods?

 

[Marc Heiler]

While noobkit is visually pleasing and I think a step in a right
direction (hope the official ruby website can incorporate some ideas) I
think using flash is a bad idea for documentation. (They use flash for
side-navs last time I checked)

 

[Ken Bloom]

I am really confused by rubybrain.com. I like the interface much more
than the ruby-doc.org documentation, Ajax makes it much more responsive.
But somehow I could never find what I was searching for and ended up
looking somewhere else.
Just some minutes ago I wanted to look up Ruby's String methods... not
such an unusual task one might think. Searching for the String class led
me here:
http://www.rubybrain.com/api/ruby-1.8.6/doc/index.html? a=C00000226&name=String
But where are the instance methods?
The ruby-doc.org docs have them:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/String.html

Someone please tell me what I do wrong (with the optional hint that I am
stupid)!

rubybrain.com includes only methods from the standard library (http://
www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/) which you get by require'ing various files
outside of the core itself. It does not include the core methods at all.
It also doesn't tell you which files you need to include to get specific
instance methods (though you can see this by clicking "show source").

ruby-doc.org suffers from the opposite problem. www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib
is really nice, letting you know exactly what you need to include, but
www.ruby-doc.org/core is miserably broken, mixing the core methods and
the stdlib methods with no way of telling which is which.

noobkit.com gets it right for the core documentation, but works like
rubybrain.com for the stdlib documentation.

I feel these all miss the features that are truly necessary to use the
documentation. The underlying schema should be as follows:

+-------------+-----------------------------------------+
| ClassName | |
| MethodName | (null if we're talking about a class |
| | or a module) |
| FileDefined | (or a special marker for core methods) |
| DocComment | (the doc comment for this class/method |
| | in this file) |
| IsModule | (for class/module definitions only) |
| SuperClass | (for class definitions only. |
| | Never store "Object" here, because some |
| | fancy logic is in order to determine |
| | whether we're extending the class or |
| | defining it for the first time with |
| | no ancestor.) |
+-------------+-----------------------------------------+

One should be able to filter by ClassName, FileDefined, or MethodName
(and hopefully some predefined groups of files, corresponding to natural
standard library divisions) including several of these criteria
simultaneously, and get a single documentation page that lays out all of
the documentation matching the filter.

Anybody got a rails app that does that?

 

[Zoop Zoop]

Interesting.
Ken, what do you think of gotapi.com?
You have to add the RoR or "Ruby standard packages" API first.

 

[Ken Bloom]

Interesting.
Ken, what do you think of gotapi.com? You have to add the RoR or "Ruby
standard packages" API first.

Pretty good. It doesn't include the ruby core though. Guess I need two
different sites, plus "gem server" for my gems?? That's too much
difficulty.

--Ken