One of the problems I was facing with the CoreTween reference documentation was the fact that CoreTween supports four different languages. Because 90% of the documentation is the same for all four languages I need some sort of scheme that wouldn’t involve duplicating any data. My first choice was of course to store the reference documentation in a good ‘ol database. But to do that effectively I also needed some sort of CMS through which I easily could fill this database. No of the shelf solution fitted this so I reverted to another solution.

For a long time I’ve been wanting to do more (and learn more about) XSLT. This fascinating XML technology has been on my mind a lot lately and so I decided that this would be a good time to start using it. The reference documentation for CoreTween is therefore stored in a simple plain XML document which is easy to edit with a normal text editor. The XML Stylesheet then converts this XML document to the appropriate HTML document containing the correct implementation language (ActionScript 1, 2, 3 or haXe). Within the XML document there are tags that look like this:

<if>
   <as3>
      void
   </as3>
   <otherwise>
      Void
   </otherwise>
</if>

This way its easy to specify only the differences between the supported programming languages and keep all the other stuff the same. The XML Stylesheet takes care of filtering the <if> tags to the correct value. These vales are passed from the URL to the PHP script that executes the XSLT processor. Try a sample of the TweenManager class for a demonstration. To change to implementation language, simply change the ‘language’ parameter on the URL to as1, as2, as3 or haxe. Follow this link to have a look inside the TweenManager XML document that defines the reference documentation.

Of course, on the final website you can easily change between implementation languages. But that’s still in the works.