JJDoc, R.I.P. A possible entry point for getting Involved in KawaDD Development

[Jonathan Revusky-3]

As I reported the other day, the KawaDD project reached a major
milestone the other day, since all the lexer and parser generation is
now done through a freemarker template front-end.

The next major steps in the road map I outlined involve consolidating
JavaCC/JJTree/JJDoc into a single program. As of today, JJDoc does not
exist as a separate program in the KawaDD codebase. It has been replaced
by a template-based front-end. It consists of 2 templates,

http://code.google.com/p/kawadd/source/browse/trunk/kawadd/src/kawadd/output/doc.html.ftl

and

http://code.google.com/p/kawadd/source/browse/trunk/kawadd/src/kawadd/output/html32.ftl

This produces pretty much the same output as JJDoc in JavaCC does,
something that is both rather unaesthetic and not extremely useful IMHO.
Basically looks like this:

http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/javacc/FMParser.html

I figure that even if you're not the best page designer in the world you
may think that you can do better than this. Now, there are currently 4
subscribers besides me on the kawadd-devel mailing list, and I have
hoped that at least one or two of you are interested in pitching in. Up
until now, though, there has not been a clear point of entry for
somebody to get their feet wet.

I think that improving the docs generation is now one clear entry point
and I intend to add this on a ToDo page on the wiki. At some point, I
hope to have a few more things on there and maybe (just maaayyybeee)
some people will step forward and take ownership of one or more of the
things there.

Anyway, if you are interested in working on the docs generation, or
maaaaybeee interested, and want to evaluate it, it basically amounts
initially to understanding the templates I link above, doc.html.ftl and
html32.ftl. I've structured it so that all the HTML output logic is
contained in an imported library, that's what html32.ftl is. So, you see
line 4 of doc.html.ftl is where the html32.ftl is imported. So
basically, the idea is that by configuring which template is imported at
that point, you could control the final output of the docs. One could
imagine a xhtml.ftl template or a html4.0.ftl template. This is stuff
that one could play with fairy easily and see some results, even do
something useful without a really huge up-front intellectual investment.
And meanwhile, you'd learn how FreeMarker templates work and also some
of the KawaDD API that is exposed to the template layer.

I am cc'ing the javacc group simply because there may be some people
lurking there who would be interested in getting involved, but were
rather discouraged by the... de.... I mean... metabolically challenged
state of that project.

Regards,

Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
KawaDD Parser Generator, http://code.google.com/p/kawadd

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