Show HN: Sodocan.js: Documentation Made Easy | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Sodocan.js: Documentation Made Easy

sodocanjs.com

52 pointsserrisande39 comments

A shame that the page has to hijack the scroll functionality, it makes for a very unpleasant "lumpy" feeling scrolling. Chrome Version 46.0.2490.80 (64-bit) on OS X Yosemite.

The parallax scrolling on the landing page does seem to go a little too far. We'll fix it soon. Thanks!

Not sure it's related to the parallax. It's more about the scroll hijacking which makes it very unpleasant on Mac using a Magic Mouse. It's really obviously broken so I'm pretty sure no-one in your team has one or else this wouldn't have been shipped.

The product seems interesting anyway!

Yup, it makes for a really horrible experience - like wading through treacle. I think this page officially marks the point at which scroll-hijacking has to stop!

Agreed. I couldn't even scroll with my mouse wheel...I had to click and drag the bar. Chrome 46.0.2490.86 on Windows 7.

If you would like to some real examples of documentation created using Sodocan.js, check out http://jesterswilde.github.io/hashids/ and http://liujoycec.github.io/jwt-simple/ . These are both created from the Blueprints template Sodone. These templates are also open-source, and we would love for you to help us improve them and add more templates!

The links on the side of both demos don't appear to do anything.

Thanks for pointing it out. This is a known bug that showed up in the deployment to gh-pages. We are currently looking into it.

First impressions: feels rather unpolished

- text is too light and hard to read. Color contrast between text and background could be higher.

- up/down arrows do nothing

- plus button shows login dialog, but you can't register from there

- TP/EX/DE buttons are not in same order as their respective sections

- missing alt text on icon buttons, so it's not clear what they do (or rather, what they're supposed to do, since some do nothing)

- like button shows wrong cursor on hover

- buttons in settings dialog do nothing

- example has no code highlighting when present

Thanks for your input! Some button don't do anything right now because there's only one entry for the category, and certainly having tooltip will be able to help with the confusion the UI causes. We have opened github issues for the rest.

If pressing a button will do nothing due to lack of content, it should either be visibly disabled or hidden

IMHO it over-done with flat ui. pixel thin font, low contrast, etc etc.

This looks really interesting, thanks for sharing.

I'm finding it quite difficult to read through the main page however, as there's something going on with the scrolling. It's hyper-sensitive, then when there are animations on the page they play through before jumping me really far.

Thanks for pointing it out - the parallax scrolling on the landing page does seem to go a little too far. We'll fix it.

I'm trying understand what this fulfills. I understand it extracts documentation from comments, and writes them to a JSON file. There are have been countless tools to do this.

But the difference of Sodocan is that it then sends these JSON files to an API server, which hosts these documentations?

So basically instead of using JSDoc + static site generator, one would use this method?

And the benefit would be that the generated documentation would be crowdsourced?

That is right - so the idea is that the project owners don't have to be the only ones to maintain the documentation, instead the users can contribute as well. The same project hosted at different places all point to the same place in the database. We also plan to add version control.

I see. But shouldn't documentation in the source code be the "only source of truth". Say I upload the documentation JSON file, and somebody else edits it online. If I re-generate the documentation from the same source code, I will no longer be able to push the changes, right?

Also, is there a demo view, as to what the generated documentation looks like?

Great project!

Thanks! To see a demo, please visit http://jesterswilde.github.io/hashids/ and http://liujoycec.github.io/jwt-simple/. As some other people have pointed out, the font is too thin and the contrast is difficult to read which is fixed by the most recent PR to the main repo (the demos haven't been updated yet). Please check back for the updated demos!

I used to be of the camp that excellent documentation for your code was a necessity. All that pretty syntax and comments above every function declaration. It made me feel like putting icing on a cake...I still agree this is required for public facing APIs and stuff offered by a company or a complicated project.

But documentation is only part of the story. You really need a full team of smart technical people, writers, and "dev evangelists" that are creating sample projects, tutorials, quick start guides, and giving feedback to the engineers on how easy their APIs are to use and understand. You can't just auto-generate docs and think you're done.

That said, I much prefer open source projects to be organized logically and the code to be "self-documenting". Don't make me wade through mounds of API documentation when I usually just end up going to the source anyway to figure out what's going on.

Thanks for all of the feedback! This project is in the early stages and we appreciate you letting us know what we can do to improve it. It's open-source, and we are very excited that there are already developers submitting pull requests to improve the user experience, and we encourage everyone to help!

I think it is a shame that most projects have only documentation in the form of one-liners for each function/variable/class. Those one-liners really don't mean much if you don't have a picture of the global architecture in your mind. That is far more important.

This is one of the things I really like about Doxygen, the ability to automatically generate relationship maps between libraries and inheritance.

This is something we plan to include in future releases as this is still a project in the early stage. We welcome your contribution!

Ok, what is the unwanted side-effect for the user? Since i cannot see pricing info or such - how do you monetize? Which part of my soul - as a user - do i sell by using the service?

And: The service looks nice - my way of asking questions does not imply a bad impression.

This is an open source project hence there is absolutely zero monetization. That said, please fork us and contribute! :)

Thank you for the answer, my bad.

I was curious about some of the tech stack since there is a section on the landing page. I recognize most of the logos, but some I don't. It'd be nice if there were links or even names on hover, instead of just one big image.

Good idea. Thanks!

Oh boy that scrolljacking :(

Please, no more of these. Scrolljacking is a real turnoff each time, it's a huge distraction.

Can we please kill scrolljacking before 2016?

Scroll hijacking in your landing page? Why?

Am I the only one, who cannot believe that websites made by (web)developers use scroll hijacking?

I find it frustrating to read the documentation demos you have created. Low contrast and poor choice of font. This is what it looks like on Chrome in Windows 7:

http://i.imgur.com/ArFcnM2.jpg

Another github user has submitted a pull request to fix the contrast. We will update the demos momentarily. Thanks!

There's a typo in the "What is sodocan.js" lane, right at the bottom of the 2nd paragraph.

natuarally => naturally

Hey there. Where could an OSS project owner find a 'getting started' guide?

Thanks for your question! The 'Getting Started' guide can be found in the Github repo README at https://github.com/sodocan/sodocan.js. We will update our site to make that link more prominent.

is it compatible with jsdoc?

Not presently, however that is something we are thinking about. Our native parser does take jsdoc-like syntax.

This is awesome!

Thanks. This is still a project in progress so please fork and contribute on Github!

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