For the past week I’ve been working hard on the CoreTween website and the CoreTween library. Small changes where made to the CoreTween library and a new reference section has been added to the website.
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.
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