> As you may know I wrote the current "Pharo help" implementation which > you can access from the Help menu or via
Yes and I still would like to convince people to write special Unitests tagged <public: #topic number: 3> to populate the help. > There is also no central "docu" point for someone who just downloaded > Pharo and want a "Quick start". Also I dislike that we are limited with > the in-image presentation style (text only) and that content is not > visible to Google, Bing, etc. Yes me too. This is why I want to write the next chapter of the book Deep into Pharo in a Pier syntax stored on SVN/Git but be able to generate html + latex (we did that for Seaside book) so it should be easy (just need time). > Packaging Seaside with the default Pharo image to serve help content > would be overkill - but there is always a leaner way. > Since Pharo 2.0 we have Zinc HTTP components within the image > (thanks Sven!) and I played a little bit with it. It is really easy > to setup/startup a webserver from Smalltalk now. :) > So I wrote a basic "HelpServer" and wrapped the nice "twitter bootstrap" > library. Code may be ugly and require some refactoring ... but it is > currently more a prove of concept. > > Attached is a screenshot of the result running in a web browser. Sweet. > What is it: the idea is that we server the documentation from within the > image but use the local webbrowser to display it. Since we soon integrate > NativeBoost in Pharo 2.0 it is also easy to open the browser as soon as > "Help" is requested from a menu. > > Serving for the web would also mean we could easily setup an image > online that displays the docu online for indexing by search engines etc. Yes :) > Where is the code: > > Next steps: > =========== > > 1. Lets discuss how we want to fill the "API help" section. I know that > there once was a project that generated static API help > (http://magaloma.seasidehosting.st) but we can now directly serve > from the live image. > > My current implementation allows to navigate from classes to > subclasses and superclasses - just to give you an idea. Maybe we > want to display only class comments or provide a real Smalltalk > browser within the webbrowser (similar to http://www.Amber-lang.net) > > 2. The section "Intro" is only a mock. I would like to see that people > can find short "Quick start" like tutorials here to start with > basic things like Smalltalk, Metacello, ... > > Maybe we can integrate a live and running ProfStef similar to > http://amber-lang.net/learn.html that is adopted to Pharo. But amber is not pharo and it has the limit of Javascript I would not do that. > > 3. Lets discuss how we want to describe the content "in-image" > for "serving on the web". Maybe with a "Markup to HTML translator" > - or a "WikiStyle to HTML" like help I want to use the pier syntax because I know that I can generate the correct latex with it for the books, and of course any kind of html and other formats. > My wish to Santa would be that Pharo 2.0 comes with a better and > nicer out-of-the-box documentation. For each package/project we should > have a common way to define/load/browse docu and tutorials so people > can just load and quick start without much hazzle. :) > The code repo is open for read and write - I would appreciate > comments, code contributions, help/tutorial content and ideas. > > Thanks > Torsten > <onlinehelp.png>
