Currently we generate our awesome reference documentation using gdoc,
which was developed to generate groovy? and grails documentation.
However groovy has migrated to asciidoctor and from what I have heard
grails is following suit.

As I am familiar with asciidoctor due to work related documentation
efforts I did a trial migration for one chapter of the reference
guide.

The idea is to make this a module of Wicket (6.x, 7.x and 8.x) and
have the example code actually be runnable as a project and have the
documentation reference (parts of) the example code. This way we can
make sure our documentation and code are in sync and that folks
copy/pasting example code have a decent shot of it working in one go.

You can find the trial project here:

https://github.com/dashorst/wicketguide

And a generated example here:

http://dashorst.github.io/wicketguide/

An example of a document that includes live code:

https://github.com/dashorst/wicketguide/blob/master/src/main/asciidoc/ajax/ajaxbehaviours.adoc

The live code that is included:

https://github.com/dashorst/wicketguide/blob/master/src/main/java/org/apache/wicket/guide/ajax/behavior/HomePage.java

I know that it is a lot of work to convert documentation, and there
are still some buts and ifs (like how to incorporate this in our site,
have a multi-page html generation, the in the README mentioned include
bug, or how to automate the conversion in a reasonable way).

I find the idea of executable and executing example code rather
enticing and I'd like to see if more folks see this happening. This
would mean more work than just a plain conversion as we need to get
(most of) the examples in working order (not all examples are intended
to compile, just to show a concept).

What do you think?

Martijn

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