Friday, November 16, 2007

Release 0.2 finished!

I finally finished the "Release 0.2" of my project which was as following

Release 0.2

Goals: Document the following Places API Interfaces

Just like before, basically, the first thing that i had to do was to start reading about the Places API documentation that already existed on the MDC website. Places API was a very interesting read because it is future implementation rather than already existing feature in Firefox. The Places API is mainly a re-write of Firefox's bookmarks and history system. It aims to have significantly more flexibility and the ability to have complex querying. It also includes some new features such as favicon storage, and the ability to annotate pages with arbitrary information. It also includes a lot of new UI.

After reading all this documentation, i read the IDL's and basically just documented them to the MDC Documentation website. I learned some new syntax into documenting some of this stuff, like how to make headers for FIREFOX 3 version, how to insert WARNINGS with standard format and how some IDL interfaces includes definition and declaration of more than one interface and that was really interesting to see how some "observers" were documented and inserted into same IDL files.

Again, much of my Thanks goes to Eric Shepherd for helping me out with all little tweaks that needed to be done and formatting my documents the correct way and guiding me along the way into how to document more effectively.

For "Release 0.1", i documented 6 IDL files but for my "Release 0.2", i ended up documenting 12 interfaces. Which tells me that i have grasped the idea of how to document these IDL's and i feel like i am getting better at it with every release.

Note: I have noticed that a lot of students when they were told to look for Interfaces documentation, they went into "mxr" and "lxr" to search for the IDL's, but i would like to inform them that it is better if they went to the MDC website instead and looked over the interface documentation there rather then on "mxr" and "lxr" because this is exactly why the MDC website exists, to guide you to proper documentation on these things. So please, use MDC website as much as you can, it is a great domain for extensive knowledge in regards to Mozilla applications. Thanks!

I would love to hear feedback about my work and if someone has any comments or critique, feel free to leave a comment here. The interfaces links are parsed on the top of this article. Thanks for reading and good luck with your project.

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