Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Welcome to jsviews.com - the documentation and download site for JsViews, JsRender and JsObservable

This blog brings two pieces of news:

The jsviews.com website
The first is in the title: There is a now a new jsviews.com  website, which provides documentation, samples, downloads, and more, for JsViews, JsRender and JsObservable.

JsRender is now officially beta
And the second is that the JsRender bits (which have been "beta candidate" for a while) have today moved to being officially labelled "beta".  

The context
In fact both JsRender and JsViews have effectively been at beta quality for some time. The plan of course is to move to V1.0 as soon as is appropriate, and in fact the current code is already very close to the targeted V1.0 version, in that the code quality is high, and the feature coverage very complete. 

So what has been missing? Well the the most important missing piece was full API documentation, and the decision was not to label a library as being an official beta release until that API documentation for that library was available. But to achieve that meant not only writing the documentation content, but also providing the website to view and navigate through that documentation. And also the plan was to provide integrated live working samples completely within the flow of the documentation - and that too needed to be designed and implemented.

So jsviews.com is that website, and it is in fact itself an example of a single-page app built entirely using JsViews and JsRender, illustrating the power of those libraries for creating dynamic interactive single-page apps. If you are interested, you can see the code for the site here. (It actually includes a hidden feature which allows it to switch into editable mode, with wiki-style content creation, so it is more sophisticated than may meet the eye in normal read-only mode).

JsRender now has detailed (and interactive) API documentation
Here it is: jsviews.com/#jsrapi. More topics will be added in the coming period (along with. later on, tutorials, and "deep-dive" topics). But already the topics give complete coverage of the primary scenarios of JsRender.

And JsViews?
JsViews API documentation will be next, and as soon as it is ready, the official beta for JsViews will be declared. (So in fact the JsViews beta version will probably be almost identical to current JsViews bits). 

JsRender and JsViews V1.0
Version V1.0 should follow not too long after, since the number of triaged issues currently planned to be addressed for V1.0 is small - and could even be reduced slightly if necessary. V1.1 planned features have also already been largely determined - and V1.1 is not intended to be major release in terms of new features.   

Integrated samples within the documentation:
Now, just to give a flavor of the features of the new documentation, here is an example of a sample - taken from the end of this documentation topic:



The sample is live. You can click on Try it and change anything you want: - the template, the data, or the code. For example if you change each of the places I have circled in red - 


- and then hit Run Code, you will get something like this:


Now if you switch to the Full Code tab, you can copy the contents of that tab, and drop them into a simple HTML page. 



Run the page and you have a fully working sample of your own modified version of the original - which you can continue to experiment with from there...

I am looking forward to completing the documentation, and hope it will help you to discover and appreciated the possibilities of JsRender and JsViews!