Release of v0.13.0

Posted on | August 8, 2011 | No Comments

One day later than planned but this is an awesome release to do! 0.13.0 brings several improvements related to inheritance of items (thus seeing your parent’s method in a child class) and not to say the least an overhaul of the Class view!

One of the big missing features was that methods from superclasses were not visible in child classes. I have been working hard on making this possible and believe me, it gave me some headaches. The concept is simple: you want to see in a child class which methods are available from the super class (thus no privates!).

In the end it meant that DocBlox would have to traverse every class in the class tree from bottom to top and add any non-overridden, protected or public methods that it would encounter to the child class. No small feat when working with larger projects, for example: for Zend Framework 33.000 methods get added onto the existing structure!

Unfortunately this means I had to sacrifice some type of performance and had to make a choice; I could keep memory usage down or I could keep processing speed down. I chose for the latter. Luckily the sacrifice was limited, i.e. ZF API Docs should still build on a normal system (I measured 600MB of RAM being used) , and smaller projects probably won’t even notice. Still; I hope to invent ways in the future to bring memory usage down.

Anyway! Here is an overview of most of the new shiny features:

• A new file/class UI optimized to deal with LOTS of methods and add more overview to your listing! See the demo at http://demo.docblox-project.org/default for an example
• @see now also links to internal classes
• Every link to a PHP Internal class will link to the PHP.net docs
• Unknown parent classes / interfaces are looked up in the include path (or PHP internally) and it’s methods and properties added as inherited methods and properties
• Support for @property, @property-read and @property-write tags is now added; if you use these in your class docblock they will be shown in the listing of methods and properties
• Added support for @uses, it links to the used element and that receives an @used_by tags which refers back
• @author and @license tags now are more readable and provide links
• @param descriptions now support markup using Markdown
• Removed the dependency with the ZF PEAR package at pear.zfcampus.org (in v0.12.2)

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