Incoming TypeFriendly 0.1.2 release

Before the end of May 2009, Invenzzia is going to release TypeFriendly 0.1.2, a HTML documentation builder with Markdown syntax. It will contain some new features and improvements that can be currently found in the SVN repository:

  • New tag manager that validates the contents and use of the tags in the chapters.
  • Support for creating appendices added.
  • New tags:
    • MultiExtends - specifying the base classes for languages with multiple inheritance
    • Throws - thrown exceptions.
    • Construct - specifying the type of described programming construct (classes, interfaces etc.)
    • Type - specifying the item type
    • Arguments - specifying and describing the function arguments
    • Returns - describing, what the function returns.
    • VCSKeywords - a place for expanding SVN keywords that can be also optionally displayed in the output.
    • Appendix - support for appendices
    • FeatureInformation - allows to define a messages in the project configuration that may be later prepended to the chapters.
  • Improved command-line interface. The usage has been changed (please take a look at the details on wiki)
  • New book creation wizard.

The release will also fix some bugs found in the previous release.

Plans for TypeFriendly 0.2

The release of TypeFriendly 0.2.0 has been moved further to the future (Summer 2009) due to the recent revision of the goals. The new TypeFriendly will consist of three parts:

  • TypeFriendly library - the documentation management functionality will be collected into a library independent from the command-line interface code that can be used by the programmers to include the TypeFriendly documenting system features into their project.
  • Command-line interface - build with TypeFriendly library will provide the features similar to the current TypeFriendly 0.1 release.
  • Web interface - since 0.2.0, you will be able to install TypeFriendly web interface on your website to run a public documentation repository with automatic uploaders, user comments etc. This feature is addressed especially to the developer teams that wish to publish the on-line documentations for their products.

TypeFriendly 0.2 will use Open Power Template both to render the static documents and in the web interface. The Markdown parser will be expanded with new features, such as mathematical formulas support. However, generating the documents in other formats than HTML will not be still possible, as we need to design our own Markdown parser and this is a longer-term goal.

Open Power Classes

The development of Open Power Classes slowly begins. eXtreme added a nice paginator class with OPT support, and I am working on the native caching system for OPT that will be available as Opc_Cache. Open Power Classes is going to be a collection of small utility classes to support other libraries.

Release plan for Open Power Template

There will be another Release Candidate version, as there have been found some small, but annoying bugs in the parser. The first stable version will be released in the first half of June then.

They wrote about...

Last Saturday, a nice note about TypeFriendly was published by Federico Cargnelutti on his blog. We are looking forward to the next publications about Invenzzia projects.