We’re very excited to announce the official release of our new documentation. Our frameworks and tools have significantly evolved since JS Duck’s creation. JS Duck has served us very well, but it is now time to move forward. Our goal with this new software is to create a beautiful and usable experience that allows developers to easily glean information with the least amount of effort. You can expect to see the new documentation rolling out within the next few days.
It may surprise users to know that we have created our new docs as HTML/JS files instead of as an Ext JS application. This decision was not made lightly. Ultimately, a web page felt more natural for documentation than an Ext JS application.
We have also reintroduced a more holistic experience to the documentation. As of Ext JS 5 (which we feel is the best javascript framework), we felt that guides and API Docs were separate concerns, so we segregated them. Unfortunately, this likely introduced more difficulty than it solved for users trying to easily navigate between concepts and technical details. To that end, our guides and API docs have been visually rejoined.
Now that we’ve talked about the whys, let’s look at some of the whats!
Table of Contents
What are the New Features?
While JS Duck did many things well, we were able to make some great improvements that we think you’re going to love.
- Improved code extraction creating more reliable output
- Updated look and feel
- Responsive design that allows for mobile and tablet support
- Docs help page to aid developers in learning the lingo
- Ignore non-documentation comments
- Fiddle is now the engine for inline examples
- Auto getters and setters are now associated with their parent members
- Improved search and filter functionality
- Scrollable member menus
- Directly link to class headers
- Improved SEO for better API search results
- Bindable indicator
- Plus, much more!
What is the Roadmap?
We’re not done yet! We have some exciting ideas to make our documentation even better. While we don’t currently have a timeline to introduce these items, they are coming.
Return of the Doc Comments
Ever since their removal, doc users have been asking for doc comments to come back. We intend to do this to allow a more streamlined method of asking for assistance, suggesting fixes, etc.
Open in Fiddle
We think that being able to open API Doc examples directly in Fiddle will allow users to easily fork our examples for experimentation and minor development.
Ready to check out the documentation?
We can’t wait to hear your feedback regarding our new documentation. We realize that this may be a big change for some of you, but we are going to do everything we can to ensure that it’s a great change.
Please be sure to leave us feedback in the Documentation forum regarding features, bugs, omissions, etc.
What's your reaction?
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Glad you’re working on modernizing the docs, but I disagree with your assessment that individual pages are better than an Ext application. In many ways, this will feel like a downgrade because you can’t maintain state as easily. For example, you can no longer have tabs and you’ll lose your place navigating in the tree view. I think the docs were the perfect candidate for an Ext application. The impressive docs app was the reason many got inspired to use Ext in the first place.
firefoxSafari,
Thanks for the feedback! I totally understand that folks may end up disagreeing with the decision, and as I mentioned, it wasn’t made lightly. It just felt like the best delivery system for documentation. That said, I have added your feedback to consider for potential inclusion. We can certainly consider a stateful tree, and maybe internal tabs.
Thanks!
Greg
Will you make engine public so users would be able to generate their own docs?
As per my answer to another user’s question here: https://www.sencha.com/forum/showthread.php?311491-Will-the-new-documentor-be-available-for-our-own-apps
“I’d love for the new docs software to be utilized by the community. That said, it’s not currently set up to be shared outside of Sencha yet. We’ll have to have some internal dialogue about the best way to potentially distribute this for other developers to use.”
Thanks!
Greg
Hopefully JSDuck will be able to pull data from ExtJS code until you release this for public. It would be real pain to have to use one docs for ExtJS and one for Custom classes
danguba,
Absolutely! JS Duck is its own thing and still exists as a great documentation tool. Developers can use anything they’d like for their own documentation. Our documentation changes are solely for our own documentation presentation at this time.
Thanks!
Greg
FYI, our new docs system is actually a two part system. The first part is called Doxi, and it’s a source parser that rips through code and exports JSON files. That is available to anyone with a recent version of Cmd. The second part is a Node processor that iterates through the JSON to output HTML. I believe the Doxi JSON can probably be consumed by any number of tools, applications, or parsers.
Thanks!
Greg
docs.sencha.com at the moment always produces HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity
It’s practically imposible to program with ExtJs without documentation. For ExtJs4 documentation was included with sources and I host and use local copy for my company needs. If you refuse to provide such option to ExtJs5+ users, then please maintain availability of that documentation as high as possible. No matter that changes you’re planing/implementing.
Aidas,
Yes, we had some down time during the sync last night. We have no plans on removing anything, it was just a server thing that lasted around 30 minutes. Docs < 5.0.0 will remain hosted in JS Duck. We can certainly provide offline documentation with our new docs if there is a desire.
Thanks!
Greg
Looks like the new docs are now available and I like them. Unfortunately, our team maintains two different ExtJS projects: One based off the ExtJs 4.x codebase and one based off the latest ExtJS 6.x codebase. I would love see these older API docs converted to the new format for consistency sake.
Thanks Jason! I’m glad you’re liking the docs. We’ll look into back-porting older docs as everything stabilizes.
Thanks!
Greg
Awesome awesome awesome! I think that the Sencha Fiddle integration is a great idea.
Thanks Jim!
I’m so happy you’re enjoying the new docs.
Thanks!
Greg
The new docs are very readable and look nice, but please bring back the tabs. The tabs tied the whole documentation together, man. Without them, the docs are less useful/grok-able.
The new docs are very good – especially the integration of fiddles.
It would be very cool to have the possibility to download the docs.
Hey Michael!
Thank you very much for the kind words! Actually, you can download all of the product documentation here:
http://docs.sencha.com/misc/guides/offline_docs.html
Thanks!
Greg
Hi,
Maybe UI design is better, but I’d prefer ExtJS app. Looks slower, need to reload every time you change history/tab.
Also, if my company made an awesome framework like ExtJS I would do my Doc App with it.
Lastly, don’t want to sound bad… but the first impression was: what is wrong with ExtJS that they are no able to do cool and modern Doc App. Is it slow, does not have the functionality…
Maybe I’m wrong but I doubt php is using pyton to make their home page.
You have a cool framework, classic and modern toolkits, cmd, you charge minimum 5 developers cause you are going big…. So please use it. Make an example of it. Make an Offline App. I think you can find all the tools at sencha.com
Thanks
Oscar,
Thanks for the feedback!
We know there are things that folks miss from the application, and we’ll work towards an application in the future. As stated previously, this was an intermediate step away from JSDuck since we had outgrown its paradigm.
We’re actively contemplating what features an application would bring with it and it’s certainly on our radar. Thank you for your patience and we hope that you come to enjoy our docs in the meantime.
Thanks!
Greg
I’ve been using JSDuck to document both sencha and non-sencha projects for the past 6 years, and am looking forwards to seeing something that can handle ES6 classes, and doesn’t have the feel of building off of an abandoned system as JSDuck now appears to be.
This article is now 2 years old; any chance of an update on this topic?
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