This blog post is aimed to summarize the enhancements and
additions in db4o documentation for the last 6 months.
Reference Documentation
The main gateway to db4o documentation is reference,
available online for registered users. Reference is aimed to cover all the
aspects of db4o usage, starting from the very first steps and extending to
advanced and implementation-specific issues. Reference documentation also
covers db4o support projects such as dRS, Object Manager, Testing Framework
etc. Please, refer to the reference start
page for the complete information about db4o documentation.
Db4o documentation provides several navigation systems,
which help users to find the required information with the least effort.
Navigational systems include:
- Search:
a highly required functionality recently extended to db4o documentation
topics. Advanced search is available through "More Search Options" link.
- Navigation
Guide: provides a very short overview of the whole document with
links.
- Index:
helps to locate content by browsing through the sorted list of addressed
topics. The same documentation chapter can have several entries in the
index list according to the highlighted content.
- Bread-crumbs:
allow to navigate to children topics. The recent improvements include
content-sensible sorting and filtering.
Usability
Among the other improvements
implemented for better usability and user-friendliness it is worth to mention:
- high-level
restructuring;
- unification
of the documentation format (wiki docs) and style;
- separation
of Java and .NET documentation content (reference, tutorial, API
documentation);
- working
with example code manual.
Offline Resources
Offline documentation improvements goal was to make sure
that sufficient documentation is provided in intuitively found locations. It
included:
- Adding
readme files in html format, explaining the content of a particular folder
in db4o distribution.
- Providing
license files for all third party tools and libraries included in the distribution.
- Supplying
offline documentation for Object Manager and dRS, including dRS API
documentation.
- Adding
direct links to the online content and other documentation resources.
Content
Some valuable general information was added to
documentation:
- Basic
concepts (ODBMS - RDBMS comparison, NQ concepts, ACID principles,
concurrency support, transaction, object identity)
- Usage
pitfalls collection.
- Reporting
systems usage with db4o (.NET. BIRT, Jasper).
- Upgraded
examples for the new non-static Configuration.
- API
docs for reflectors, events and some other packages and classes.
- Improved
configuration documentation (local and client/server).
- Testing
framework documentation.
- OSGi
documentation
- New
introduction.
- Improved
Collections documentation
- Improved
NQ documentation: NQ concepts, NQ syntax, NQ examples collection.
- Improved
callbacks documentation and examples (committed callbacks, referential
integrity and autoincrement examples).