[teaser] for third party developers

[Bernard Devlin]

Sean, I think this is a great idea.  Not only would it centralize
documentation for different libraries, but it could also serve as a
kind of advert/reminder of those libraries.

Many users of this list have written a wide variety of helpful
libraries.  If these libraries could have their documentation listed
with Rev in this 'Third Party' category, then once someone had Rev
installed merely by looking through this category they would see how
many great solutions have been written using Rev.

I'm thinking that this would need some approval from Runrev, e.g. a
format for the docs (you wouldn't want this broken if the docs
changed).  And it would require the people who write the libraries to
e.g. make their documentation conform to that format and either submit
their documentation to Runrev for inclusion or make it available at a
network reachable URL so that the Dictionary could go out to the
internet and harvest the documentation.

Just imagine how many features this would add to a Rev user's toolkit:
date manipulation libraries, S3, mail, growl, curl, enhanced
quicktime, error reporting, JSON, ip address resolution, kiosk mode,
etc.  I'm sure there are many more that I don't even remember.

Obviously the new data grid documentation could also be included
(although I imagine that's already on the cards for inclusion in the
main dicationary).

Alternatively, maybe we can set up a single website where developers
could submit their formatted documentation, and then there would only
be one place for the Dictionary to check to see if there is new
documentation to add.

Maybe some developers would prefer to just keep their stuff
exclusively on their own site, as a way of drawing attention to the
other things they do.

I can imagine that if Runrev were to make any official way to add to
the docs, they would want to distance themselves from the third party
libraries.

Anyway, I think it would be a way of making the whole Rev ecosphere
stronger.  I've seen it mentioned many times that only a small
fraction of users will ever post a question to a mailing list or
forum.  They might just download Rev, think Rev can't do what they
want, and forget about Rev.

Bernard

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 5:46 AM, Shao Sean<shaosean at wehostmacs.com> wrote:
> I have been working on this for quite some time now and have the majority of
> the basics working so am going to publicly mention it (a few knew about it
> privately)..
>
> As the subject states, this is for the group of Rev developers who develop
> third party add-ons but it is also for anyone who uses any of those
> add-ons..
>
> What is it? It is a small hack to the IDE (no changes are made to any of
> their files) that allows third party developers to place their documentation
> into the Revolution dictionary into a new category called "Third Party"..
>
> Check out the latest screen capture < http://shaosean.tk/images/teaser2.png
>> and anyone interested in testing it out, please feel free to email me <
> info AT shaosean DOT tk >
>
> -Sean
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