I am refactoring my first pass Vue dashboard application, which uses vue-chartjs to access chart.js.
As part of doing this, I am creating a set of wrapper components that encapsulate more functionality than just the chart itself, e.g. titles, dialogs, measures etc. In doing this, I am finding that how vue-chartjs adds complexity to my task for multiple reasons, e.g. the structure of renderChart props doesn't match the parameters of chartjs itself. Also, vue-chartjs has its own unique capabilities that add a layer of complexity to using chartjs.
I assume there are other complexities that are reduced by using vue-chartjs, but... my question is:
Do experienced Vue developers use vue-chartjs to access chart.js? Or do you go direct to chart.js? My first pass approach was derived from a tutorial, and I didn't question it at the time. Now that I'm doing more complex things, vue-chartjs is getting in my way as I try to simplify and minimize data marshaling.
For now I am working around these issues, but if it is reasonable to create my own wrappers rather than add an unnecessary level through vue-charts, I would like to try that. But I don't want to venture into this without first asking for feedback from other dashboard folks who have done it!
Thanks for any advice on this.
Anecdotally speaking, I've found in some code reviews less experienced devs tend to rely on vue-**** wrapper libraries even when there is little (or even no) benefit. Adding additional libraries increases exposure to more dependencies, each of which theoretically carries a potential for security vulnerability. I've also seen the opposite, where the functionality is re-invented when a vue library is available and would save significant amount of time and have a more robust component(like including aria fields or thoroughly tested with various browsers). The tl;dr; being, I take is on a case by case basis.
I agree with #Daniel. I can give another example where I used vue-popper wrapper package. The component itself is not bad, it's well done, however, it uses the previous major version of popper.js which lacks good new features and improvements. For this reason I created later my own implementation of vue popper with the latest version.
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I have always liked the documentation on Java APIs, generally speaking, but I know some people consider them lacking. So I'm wondering, what do you consider a good example of API documentation?
Please, include a link or an actual example in any answer. I want to have references that I (and others, of course) can use to improve our own documents.
A good documentation MUST have:
datatypes specs - often more essential than actual functions. Do NOT treat this lightly.
function specs (this is obvious). Including What given function does, why it does it (if not obvious), and caveats if any.
an introduction document that binds the whole into a logical entity, explaining the intentions, correct usage patterns and ideas beyond the scope of actual API code. Normally you are given 50 different functions and you don't know which must be used, which shouldn't be used outside of specific cases, which are recommended to more obscure alternatives and why must they be used that way.
examples. Sometimes they are more important than all the rest
I know how to draw an arbitrary shape of arbitrary color in GTK+. I still have no clue why a change of drawing color requires three quite long lines of very obscure, quite unintuitive lines of code. Remembering SVGAlib's setcolorRGB(r,g,b); draw(x1,y1,x2,y2); I find it really hard to comprehend what possessed the authors of GTK+ to complicate things so much. Maybe if they explained the underlying concepts instead of just documenting functions that use them, I'd understand...
Another example: yesterday I got an answer that allowed me to understand SQLite. I understood a function extracting data from a column returns signed long long. I understood the integer columns could be 1,2,4,6 and 8 bytes long. I understood I can define a column as "UNSIGNED INT8", or "TINYINT". I didn't quite get what "affinity" meant, I just knew both had "INTEGER" affinity. I spent hours seeking whether timestamps should be UNSIGNED INTEGER or INT8, whether INT8 is 8-digits or 8-bytes, and what is the name of that esoteric 6-byte int?
What I missed was that "UNSIGNED INT8", "TINYINT" and the like are all a syntactic sugar synonyms for "INTEGER" type (which is always signed long long), and the lengths given are for internal disk storage only, are adjusted automatically and transparently to fit any value on least number of bits and are totally invisible and inaccessible from the API side.
Actually the iPhone (really Mac Cocoa/framework) documentation has gotten pretty good. The features I like are:
Very easy jump to docs from the API.
Well formatted and the code snippets
you would want to copy and paste
(like method signatures) stand out.
Links to projects with sample code
right from the docs.
Automated document refresh mechanism,
but by default docs are all local to
start (so you can live with a flaky
internet connection).
Easy way to switch between variants
of documentation (to see different
versions of the OS), and also select
which sets of documentation to run
searches against.
An overview section explains what the
class is for, followed by a section
breaking out methods grouped by
purpose (methods to create and
object, methods to query for data,
methods to work with type
conversions, etc), followed by the
detailed method explanations.
I also personally really liked Javadoc and the Java system documentation (I used that for many years), I found a benefit there was it was a little easier to make your own custom docs for your own classes that flowed well with the system docs. XCode lets you also use Doxygen to generate documentation for your own classes, but it would take a but more work to format it as well as the system class docs, in part because the system framework documents have more formatting applied.
A good API will have the following characteristics:
Easy to learn
Easy to use, even without documentation
Hard to misuse
Easy to read and maintain code that uses it
Sufficiently powerful to satisfy requirements
Easy to extend
Appropriate to audience
The most common mistake I see in API design is when developers feel auto-generated XML commenting is sufficient, and then precede to auto-generate their API based off of the XML comments. Here's what I'm talking about:
///<summary>
/// Performs ObscureFunction to ObscureClass using ObscureArgument
///</summary>
void ObscureClass.ObscureFunction(ObscureArgument) { ... }
API's like the one above are only counter-productive and frustrate the developer using the API. Good API documentation should give developers hints as to how to use API and give them insight into certain facets of the API they otherwise would not notice.
I personally believe a perfect example of good documentation is PHP's documentation:
For an example:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fopen.php
I think effective documentation includes:
Parameter listing
(Useful) description of the parameter
If they parameters are a string, list
out and EXPLAIN every possible
possible parameter
Return values on both successful
execution and non-successful
execution
Any exceptions/errors it can raise
Examples (THE MOST IMPORTANT imo)
Optionally:
Changelog
Notes/Examples from other users
Whenever I look up something in the PHP documentation I almost know exactly how to use it without having to scour the internet to find "better" examples. Usually the only time which I need to search the internet is when I need to find how to use a set of functions for a specific purpose. Otherwise, I think the PHP documentation is the greatest example of excellent documentation.
What is think is an example of a alright documentation is Python's:
http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/array.html
It lists out the methods but it doesn't do a good job of actually explaining in depth what it is, and how to use it. Especially when you compare it to the PHP docs.
Here is some really bad documentation: Databinder Dispatch. Dispatch is a Scala library for HTTP that abstracts away the (Java) Apache Commons HTTP library.
It uses a lot of functional-syntax magic which not everyone is going to be very clear on, but provides no clear explanation of it, nor the design decisions behind it. The Scaladocs aren't useful because it isn't a traditional Java-style library. To really understand what is going on, you basically have to read the source code and you have to read a load of blog posts with examples.
The documentation succeeds in making me feel stupid and inferior and it certainly doesn't succeed in helping me do what I need to do. The flipside is most of the documentation I see in the Ruby community - both RDoc and in FAQs/websites/etc. Don't just do the Javadoc - you need to provide more comprehensive documentation.
Answer the question: "how do I do X with Y?" You may know the answer. I don't.
My main criteria is - tell me everything I need to know and everything I'll ever want to know.
QT has pretty decent docs:
http://doc.qt.digia.com/4.5/index.html
Win32 MSDN is also pretty good although it didn't age well.
The java docs are horrible to me. They constantly tell me everything I don't want to know and nothing of what I do want to know. The .NET docs has a similar tendency although the problem there is mostly the extreme wordyness, overflow of so much superfluous details and so much god damn pages. Why can't I see both the summary and the methods of a class in the same page?
I like Twitter's documentation. To me a good API is up to date, easy to read and contains examples.
I think that a good API document needs to clearly explain:
What problem this API solves
When you should use it
When you shouldn't use it
Actual code showing "best practice" usage of the API
Not quite API documentation but nevertheless quite useful is the Oracle database documentation, e.g. for the SELECT statement. I like the inclusion of diagrams which helps to clarify the usage for example.
Just a few thoughts...
Examples - win32 API documentation is better than iPhone's because of:
(short) code examples
I vote for any API doc with small and make-sense examples
Don't ever never show "Form1", "asdf", "testing users" in screen shots or sample codes
good API is solving real world problems and there should be some meaningful examples
Don't auto-gen doc
documentation should not be done during writing code (or by the same guy)
doc is for a stranger, whom the programmers usually don't care of
Avoid ___V2 version of API
but it's not a doc issue
Basically, tell the story of the class at the class level. Why is this here? What should it do? What should be in here? Who wrote it?
Tell the story of methods at the method level. What does this do? No matter how accurate your methods names are, 20-30 characters just won't always cut it for descriptiveness.
#author:
Who wrote this? Who's proud of it? Who should be ashamed of their work?
Interface level documentation tells me:
what should this do?
what will it return?
Implementation level documentation tells me:
how does it do it? what kind of algorithm? what sort of system load?
what conditions might cause a problem? will null input cause an issue? are negative numbers okay?
Class level documentation tells me:
what goes here? what kind of methods should I expect to find?
what does this class represent?
#Deprecated tells me:
why is this planned for removal?
when is it expected to be removed?
what is the suggested replacement?
If something is final:
why didn't you want me to extend this?
If something is static:
remind me in the class level doc, at least implicitly.
In general: you're writing these for the next developer to use if and when you hit the lottery. You don't want to feel guilty about quitting and buying a yacht, so pay a bit of attention to clarity, and don't assume you're writing for yourself.
As the side benefit, when someone asks you to work with the same code two years from now and you've forgotten all about it, you're going to benefit massively from good in-code documentation.
First point for a great API-documentation is a good naming of the API itself. The names of methods and parameters should be say all. If the language in question is statically typed, use enums instead of String- or int-constants as parameters, to select between a limited set of choices. Which options are possible can now be seen in the type of the parameter.
The 'soft-part' of documentation (text, not code) should cover border-cases (what happens if I give null as parameter) and the documentation of the class should contain a usage-example.
Good documentation should have at least the following:
When an argument has additional limitations beyond its type, they need to be fully specified.
Description of the [required] state of an object before calling the method.
Description of the state of an object after calling the method.
Full description of error information provided by the method (return values, possible exceptions). Simply naming them is unacceptable.
Good example: Throws ArgumentOutOfRangeException if index is less than 0 -or- index is greater than or equal to Count.
Bad example: Returns 0 for success or one of the following E_INVALIDARG, etc... (without specifying what makes an argument invalid). This is standard "FU developer" approach taken in the PS3 SDK.
In addition, the following are useful:
Description of the state of an object if an exception is thrown by the method.
Best practices regarding classes and groups of classes (say for exceptions in .NET) in the API.
Example usage.
Based on this:
An example of great documentation is the MSDN library.
To be fair, the online version of this does suffer from difficulty of navigation in cases.
An example of terrible documentation is the PS3 SDK. Learning an API requires extensive testing of method arguments for guessing what may or may not be the actual requirements and behavior of any given method.
IMO examples are the best documentation.
I really like the Qt4 Documentation, it first confronts you only with the essential information you need to get things working, and if you want to dig deeper, it reveals all the gory details in subsections.
What I really love, is the fact that they built the whole documentation into Qt Creator, which provides context sensitive help and short examples whenever you need them.
One thing I've always wanted to see in documentation: A "rationale" paragraph for each function or class. Why is this function there? What was it built for? What does it provide that cannot be achieved in any other way? If the answer is "nothing" (and surprisingly frequently it is), what is it a shorthand for, and why is that thing important enough to have its own function?
This paragraph should be easy to write - if it's not, it's probably a sign of a dubious interface.
I have recently come across this documentation (Lift JSON's library), which seems to be a good example of what many people have asked for: nice overview, good example, use cases, intent, etc.
i like my documentation to have a brief overview at the top, with fully featured examples below, and discussions under these! I'm surprised that few include simple function arguments with their required variable types and default values, especially in php!
I'm afraid i can't really give an example because i havent trawled through to find which ones my favourite, however i know this probably doesn't count because its unofficial but Kohana 3.0's Unofficial Wiki By Kerkness is just brilliant! and the Kohana 2.34 documentation is pretty well laid out too, well at least for me. What do you guys think?
Most people have listed the points making up good API documentation, so I am not going to repeat those (data type specs, examples, etc.). I'm just going to provide an example which I think illustrates how it should be done:
Unity Application Block (Go to the Download section for the CHM)
All the people involved in this project have done a great job of documenting it and how it should be used. Apart from the API reference and detailed method description, there are a lot of articles and samples which give you the big picture, the why and how. The projects with such good documentation are rare, at least the ones I use and know about.
The only criteria for documentation quality is that it speeds up development. If you need to know how something works, you go and read docs. One doc is better than another if you've understood everything from first doc faster than from from second.
Any other qualities are subjective. Styles, cross-references, descriptions… I know people who likes to read books. Book-styled doc (with contents/index/etc.) will be good for him. Another my friend likes to doc everything inside code. When he downloads new library, he gets sources and "reads" them instead of docs.
I, personally, like JavaDocs. Like Apple dev docs with the exception of lower-level parts, for example, Obj-C runtime (reference part) is described awfully. Several website APIs have docs I like also.
Don't like MSDN (it's good in general but there are too many variants of the same document, I get lost often).
Documentation is only a part of the big picture, API design. And one could argue the latter is much more important than just the naming. Think of meaningful non-duplicating method names, etc.
I would definitely recommend watching Josh Bloch's presentation about this:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design OR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAb7hSCtvGw
This covers not only what you're looking for but much more.
Lots of practical, real-world examples are a must. The recent rewrite of jQuery's API documentation is a good example, as well as Django's legendary docs.
The best documentation I've found is Python. You can use sphinx to generate the source documentation into HTML, LaTeX and others, and also generate docs from source files; the API doc you are looking for.
API docs is not only the quality of the final documentation, but also how easy is for the developers and/or technical writers to actually write it, so pick a tool that make the work easier.
Most things about good documentation have already been mentioned, but I think there is one aspect about the JavaDoc way of API documentation that is lacking: making it easy to distinguish between the usage scenarios of all the different classes and interfaces, especially distinguishing between classes that should be used by a library client and those that should not.
Often, JavaDoc is pretty much all you get and usually there is no package documentation page. One is then confronted with a list of hundreds or even more of classes: where and how to start? What are typical ways of using the library?
It would be good if there were conventions of how to make it easy to provide this information as part of JavaDoc. Then the generated API documentation could allow for different views for different groups of people -- at a minimum two groups: those who implement the library and those who use it.
I find Google APIs a beautiful example of Good documentation API.
They have:
Bird's eyes view of the entire APIs structure
Overviews of the main features of the single API
Nice and colored examples for a quick feedback
Detailed references
A blog that keep you updated
A google groups that documents problems and solutions
Videos
FAQ
Articles
Presentations
Code Playground
A search engine to crawl inside a pile of documentation
That's it!
When I play with google APIs documentation site, I feel at home.
Go to the Doxygen site and look at the examples of the HTML that it generates. Those are good:
http://www.doxygen.nl/results.html
I'm working now on an API for developers feature of our product.
The first version was released and it has small number of users at the moment. Since I started to develop its second version, some parts were reworked, some parts were removed to make the API more elegant and clear.
But the 2nd version deployment can be a pain for old version users.
Our marketing department is planning to enhance our API product a lot, add more features to it.
How should I build the system, so
1) we wouldn't be constrained to the "old version" to add new interesting features
2) current API users won't be dissatisfied because of the need to rework their systems in order to comply with the changed API
Or should the API products be tested in a sandbox for quite a long period of time before the public release, so there wouldn't be any significant modifications in the specification?
When you have to make changes to the API which already has some users, probably the best route is to deprecate the old API calls and encourage use of the new calls.
Removing the capability of the old API calls would probably break the functionality of old code, so that is probably going to cause some developers using your "old" API to become somewhat dissatisfied.
If your language provides ways to indicate that certain functionality has been deprecated, it can serve as a indication for the users to stop using old API calls and transition to new calls instead. In Java, the #deprecated javadoc tag can provide notes in the documentation that a feature has been deprecated, or from Java 5 the #Deprecated annotation can be used to raise compile-time warnings on calls to deprecated APIs features.
Also, it would probably be a good idea to provide some tips and hints on migrating from the old API to the new API to encourage people to use the new way of interacting with the API. Having examples and sample code on what to do and what not to do, the users of the API would be able to write code according to the new, preferred way.
It's going to be difficult to change a public API, but with some care taken in the transition from the old to new, I believe that it the amount of pain inflicted on the users of the API can be mitigated to a certain extent.
Here's an article on How and When to Deprecate APIs from Sun, which might provide some more information on when it would be appropriate to deprecate parts of APIs.
Also, thank you to David Schmitt who added that the Obsolete attribute in .NET is similar to the #Deprecated annotation in Java. (Unfortunately the edit was overwritten by my edit, as we were both editing this answer at the same time.)
Microsoft is pretty famous for their insane backwards compatibility. One of the things they did was to keep all the old obsolete calls, and then add new ones that new programs could use to access the enhanced features that they could not work into the old API.
You did not specify which programming language you use, but both .NET and Java has a mechanism to mark certain API calls as obsolete. If backward compatibility is very important for you, you might want to take the same route.
It's a balance you will have to strike with your community:
Keep old functions for aeons and you'll end up with the Win32 API (30000 public
functions)?
Rewrite the API all the time, and you can get something similar to .NET, where a new revision goes out every so often (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5...) and breaks existing programs or introduces new and improved ways of doing UIs etc.)
If the community is tolerant of change and open to experimenting, you will strive for a lean, current API and know that some breakage, aka bit rot, will result. If, on the other hand, the community has tons of legacy code and no resources or desire to bring it up to the latest version, you must keep backward compatibility or all of their stuff will simply not work on the new API.
Note to one of the other answers: deprecating APIs is an often-used way of indicating which functions are "on the way out", but as long as they work, many developers will use them even in the new code because those are the functions they are used to. There are very few enlightened developers that have both the awareness to actually heed "Deprecated" warnings and the time to search the code for other instances of the old API and update them.
Backward compatibility should be the default. The only reason you should compromise this principle is when the API is somehow insecure which forces users to change to more secure methods.
Idealy applicitations written to your original API will continue to work with the new version.
One way to add new features while at the same time making sure that old applications continue to run is to have two versions of an API call.
For example, suppose you currently have a function Foo that takes 2 parameters (arguments) in the API but you decide the new version really should take 3 parameters. Keep Foo the way it is and add a new function Foo2 which takes 3 parameters.
That way users can continue to code against Foo for backward compatibility or use the new Foo2 function if they require the new features.
This technique has been commonly used bu Microsoft for the Windows APIs.