[Nitro] RDog ping

[James Britt]

Andrew Thompson wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 07:55:09AM -0700, James Britt wrote:
> 
>>TRANS wrote:
>>
>>>I like the sound of this Rue project. Is it a complete RDoc
>>>replacement, or does it just mod Roc?
>>
>>It uses the built-in rdoc to drive the Rue template.  Normally (I think) 
>>the output is a set of HTML pages that use AJAX to fetch and render the 
>>API content.  Not sure where the YAML is created (perhaps it feeds the 
>>sever for delivering content; I've only poked around, not properly run it).
>>
>>But it does include an rdoc template that generates the YAML (again, 
>>driven by the built-in rdoc that Dave Thomas wrote).
>>
> 
> Rdoc allows you to write new 'generators', it ships with 3; the xml the
> html and the ri ones, anyone can develop more but it's a real pain in
> the ass to do so.


Rue is a template; if I run

rdoc --template 'rue' -1

I get (usually)  a slew of data/*.txt files and an HTML page or so that 
will use Ajax to render those data files.

If I run

rdoc --template 'rue-yaml' -1 > my-data.yml

I get a big YAML file.

But Rue also includes rdoc-hacks.rb, which mods the default rdoc 
behavior (which may be a simpler approach than writing a generator from 
scratch).

The YAML emitted by Rue looks much much nicer than the default ri/rdoc 
YAML, which embeds object types into the text.  The Rue YAML is simply 
structure tagged text; you can play with a hash of arrays of hashes (r 
arrays ...) and reorganize it as you like.


You can grab Rue here (an unofficial download spot; the actual Ruedoc 
project seems to have withered away):

http://www.ruby-doc.org/download/code/ruedoc-0.1.2.tar.gz


One thought was to load in the YAML and hold a custom API data-model in 
memory, unnormalized and optimized for searching and commenting. 
(Though I wonder if Madeleine might be a fit as well).

And, as with Madeleine, have it back itself up with periodic snapshots, 
using Og + Kirbybase or Sqlite.

If the memory footprint isn't too great, it might work as a standalone, 
desktop Ruby API server, faster than ri (which is parsing YAML off disk 
on every query), with options to add your own notes and comments.

Bundle it up with Nitro+Mongrel, some nice AJAX calls, or whatever.


-- 
James Britt

"In Ruby, no one cares who your parents were, all they care
  about is if you know  what you are talking about."
   - Logan Capaldo