Steal this incremental menu!
A drop-in incremental menu in JavaScript.
One thing that really sucks about Java programming is the keyboard-unfriendly
user interface to the normal "javadoc"-generated documentation.
To look up a class in the HTML documentation, one scrolls to the class name
in a long list of links in a frame, then clicks on that. Scrolling is a lousy
user interface; it requires much more hand-eye coordination than
typing.
So, I decided to build something in
JavaScript that you could drop into a javadoc-generated file to make
it an incremental menu. To my great surprise, it turned out to be possible.
The source: incremental-menu.txt (a JavaScript fragment)
Demo: steal-this-incremental-menu-demo.html
Works with:
Netscape 4.76 on Windows.
Netscape 6.1 on Windows (slow)
Internet Explorer 5.50 (slow)
The "slow" part is at startup - the script compiles an array of strings
for it to index when searching, and the old Netscape made that a lot easier
than the new one. I'm hoping that this might be acceptably slow on
modern systems with fast processors.
If you can verify that it runs on other systems, or you can suggest
changes to the code to make it run on other systems, or speed it up on
those that it is slow on, or some other interesting modifications,
send me e-mail at <jutta@pobox.com>.
To install:
- Find the allclasses-frame.html file that's part of the
documentation you want to turn into an incremental
menu.
- Download the source,
and copy ("yank") it into a buffer.
- Paste it into the allclasses-frame.html's <HEAD> element,
and save.
JavaScript
This was my first larger JavaScript program, and I sincerely hope it will be my last.
What a nightmare of incompatibilities, bugs and special cases.
Peter-Paul Koch's
W3C DOM Compatibility Table saved
me much time and quite possibly my sanity.
Other Sources
JavaDoc is very modular and flexible; there are other documentation systems
that build on top of that. If you've got a favorite that you would like listed,
send me email at <jutta@pobox.com>.
jde-docindex
Native javadoc integration for the Emacs JDE
Bouvard & Pècuchet
A javadoc extension generates database files that can be viewed by a special browser.
Licensing
You can modify or copy this for any use, commercial or private, free of charge,
but leave my copyright notice in my part of the code, and don't claim I wrote something I didn't.
History
Nov 5, 2001 - added "other sources" section.
Oct 30, 2001 - initial publication.
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