Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
YUI Library, YUI Doc, and Github
Category: Yahoo!
Eric Miraglia and our friends at Yahoo! have announced YUI Doc, “a python-based documentation tool that generates API documentation for JavaScript code. YUI Doc was developed by Adam Moore, one of the principal engineers on the YUI project since its inception, to support YUI’s API-level documentation.”
It is a comment-driven system in which documentation is parsed from comment blocks that describe the structure of your code. Unlike some analagous systems, YUI Doc is designed to work purely from comments; as a result, there is no idiom or code pattern with which the tool is incompatible.
But, there is more. YUI Library is out there, and it includes a link to the Git documentation for how to get the YUI source. Congrats to the YUI team for getting their code into a public repository for us to enjoy. This is a big deal for the project, and the community.
Related Content:
YUI doc seems very promising. We developed a similar tool that was comment driven and this is the right approach. We never released our tool and we probably never will since this one does the same thing. JSDoc tends to parse the code and requires to use specific coding patterns. So we couldn’t use that tool for generating documentation for TinyMCE. YUI doc worked right out of the box with just minor changes to our doc comments.