Release of v0.16.0

Posted on | November 14, 2011 | 1 Comment

After the great news that SugarCRM has started using DocBlox I am happy to announce the immediate availability of DocBlox 0.16.0; this release revolves around fixing bugs, making minor improvements and improving general code quality. A week later then scheduled because I did not deem that version stable enough; well-tested enough and I lacked the time to fix and test that in time.

Features

The highlights for this release are:

• checkstyle output; Ben Selby contributed a theme which outputs the errors collected by DocBlox in checkstyle format. This enabled you to add it to Jenkins and use DocBlox more as a QA tools in addition to the generation of your documentation.
• There was a regression bug which prevented phar files from being read; this has been fixed
• Search in the sidebar was case sensitive; is not case insensitive
• Listing of @api elements in the sidebar was absent; is now re-implemented
• New command line argument –sourcecode which generates a basic syntax-highlighted source code views with each file listing
• More fine-grained control of which tags are indicated as deprecated, or which are required per element type, see http://www.soulbroken.co.uk/blog/2011/10/defining-requireddeprecated-tags-in-docblox for a more in-depth explanation.
• Formatting errors in the title were fixed
• The code behind the Class diagram has changed to work smoother and to show the full diagram at page load; thus preventing the ‘white screen’.
• And several other smaller bug fixes were done

For those of you wondering; global search has not yet been re-implemented. I am working on a new search algorithm which would help speed up search using Javascript.

In addition to all of the above have we made huge progress in reducing the amount of errors in the Coding standards, improved automated testing, added a CI bot to the #docblox channel on FreeNode and more smaller improvements.

Next version

In the previous sprint we have made a start with refactoring the inheritance component of DocBlox to speed it up and during this we found an interesting article on the fastest way to build a tree (http://tech.vg.no/2011/10/31/building-tree-structures-in-php-using-references/) which is actually one of the challenges in DocBlox when working with large projects.

We will be continuing work on this; making more performance improvements and trying to close as many issues as possible.

The date for next release will be December 4th.

Themes

DocBlox currently includes a few basic themes; of which the Default theme provides a basis on which other themes might work.

But we want more! Do you have a killer-theme? Or have you ever wanted to build one? Get in touch, build it or send it! I’d love to help you on your way or give ideas if needed.

Conclusion

Lot’s of stuff got improved but there is more to be done; and so we shall!

Have fun and see you with the next release at December 4th!

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