Download API Javadoc

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Getting back to the main topic, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to write a script to pull down the online docs page by page to a local directory.

If anybody still cares, I've whipped up a quick Java app to do this. Run it as follows:

java -jar ApiDownloader.jar targetdir

where targetdir is the local directory path where you want the downloaded files stored. Remember to enclose the path in quotes if it contains spaces.

Source is included in the zip if you want to tinker.

[jreichen]

Thanks for sharing it Greg. What tool do you use to automatically generate wrapper APIs from the javadoc?

I'm looking forward to trying stuckless' RPC APIs, too.

[GKusnick]

My wrapper generator is a purpose-built VB.Net app that uses an embedded browser control to download the pages and traverses the HTML DOM tree to build a description of each API class and its methods. I'm not trying to keep the source secret or anything like that; I just didn't think to include it in the Tools package because it's sort of a second-order tool that I figured nobody but me would ever need to run, hence no special need for open-source transparency. (That and the fact that I'm not sure how many people here are fluent enough in VB to make sense of it.)

This new API downloader is not based on that source (obviously). I started from scratch in Java because the problem isn't that complicated and I thought it would be more accessible this way.

[stuckless]

I'm looking forward to trying stuckless' RPC APIs, too.

You can test it out if you like. I've created another discussion thread for it.

I wasn't planning on releasing it as a stand-alone library, but as a part of another project... but given the that there are a couple of people expressing interest, I thought I'd release it and get some feedback.

[jreichen]

You have both done some great work! The RPC APIs could really open up some possibilities for new plugins.

The reason I asked about the API generation is that I have been hand-coding API wrappers for the JSP tag library in the mobile web server. The tag library is incomplete because it's a tedious process, only adding wrappers as I need them. It would be nice to automate that. Nielm's webserver API's are the same way. (Both of them also provide additional utilities, though. The utilities could be split into a separate package to maintain a clean separation.)

The RPC APIs are another example of the need for automating the wrapper generation. I also would like to have a JSON wrapper, and I see in Sean's wiki that he plans to create that.

[stuckless]

The reason I asked about the API generation is that I have been hand-coding API wrappers for the JSP tag library in the mobile web server. The tag library is incomplete because it's a tedious process, only adding wrappers as I need them. It would be nice to automate that. Nielm's webserver API's are the same way. (Both of them also provide additional utilities, though. The utilities could be split into a separate package to maintain a clean separation.)

I realize this is once again off the original topic..... You mentioned about generating tag libraries.... The generator api in the RPC source can be extended to do just about anything. The code in the org.jdna.sage.api.generator package uses a 2 phase approach. The first is parsing/collecting, the second is generating. In my case, I wrote a SageAPI generator that gets passed the parsed data (metadata for classes and methods) and it churns out the generated API. When/If I do the json/xml generator, i'll just create another generator class for those, so you could create your own tag generator quite easily as well, as long as you can generate what you need from the metadata provided.

[nielm]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Getting back to the main topic, it seems like it wouldn't be hard to write a script to pull down the online docs page by page to a local directory. This is in essence what the wrapper generators do.

I used wget (specifically, Cygwin's version)

wget --mirror http://download.sage.tv/api

[stuckless]

I used wget (specifically, Cygwin's version)

gotta love command line tools

[jreichen]

Originally Posted by stuckless

...so you could create your own tag generator quite easily as well, as long as you can generate what you need from the metadata provided.

Thanks, I'll look into it.

[stuckless]

Thanks, I'll look into it.

If you want help with it... send me a PM with your goals for autogenerating tags, and I'll try to help any way I can.

[phocker]

I had no idea that this small little question would start such a huge discussion...awesomeness!!!

paul