Features

At current I have managed to fulfil many of the requirements that I had written down, and I will try to give a run down of the most notable features:

• Fast: it is currently able to fully parse and transform (these are rough stats, more detailed benchmarks may follow on another page):
  • Agavi 1.0.4 and Solar Framework 1.1.2 in less than 90 seconds
  • Zend Framework 2 in approximately 17 minutes
• Low memory usage: during the process I have not yet been able to detect any higher memory usage than 50MB when parsing Zend Framework 2. Agavi and Solar Framework did not even exceed 20MB.
• Namespace support: no further explanation required, right?
• Incremental parsing: the parsing process is capable of detecting changes in the given fileset and only parse those files that actually have changed. This will speed up the process a lot for Continuous Integration servers.
  • For example: Agavi 1.0.4 parsed in approximately 3 seconds when no changes where present.
• Two-step process: DocBlox first parses the source code and generates an XML file containing the structure of the given application and then you may invoke the transformer to generate HTML output
• Search: DocBlox supports a Javascript search option. Whichever term you enter is matched and you can see immediately go to the right page.
• Theming and Templating: DocBlox separates the matter of templates and themes: a theme is a collection of files used to generate a certain look and feel, where as a template is a collection of transformation rules which grants the power to generate anything in any combination of Look and Feels. with your own template you could even generate multiple themes in one documentation site if you’d wanted to!
• Custom renderers / writers: if themes do not give enough control over the layout and output format: a developer is able to write a class (called a Writer) which transforms the XML file into the needed output.