For a while now I’ve been working on a project to create a Mozilla Developer Resource Kit (MDRK). After spending three years helping students get started in the Mozilla world I’ve had a few ideas how to make life for new developers coming to Mozilla a bit easier. The MDRK is something we’ll be working on into the fall, but I wanted to share one piece of it now.
My work with Dehydra got to the point last week (see bug 435814) that it was time to make a demo–actually, Benjamin gave me the push I needed to finally get it done so he could take it with him to the GCC Developers’ Summit. I’m not sure what the final UI for this should be, but since I had code for the MDRK to improve the front-end of MXR, I decided to hack my Dehydra SQLite database into it. After trying several ways to partition the Mozilla type system so it was useable in GUI form, Mark Finkle suggested that I use Schrep’s Mozilla Platform diagram. It’s not perfect, but it provided a handy way to begin. Here’s what it looks like when you start:
Clicking one of the modules in the diagram (NOTE: SQLite, NSPR, and Cairo are C, so I don’t have Dehydra info for them yet) gives you a list of Classes, Structs, and Interfaces:
Next, you can click a type’s declaration location (in gray text to the right of the type name) to see the code, or click the type name itself to get information about its members, bases, and derived types:
I’ve got a broken implementation of “show all callers,” which should not be taken as accurate yet (i.e., clicking a member name will often give no results at this point). However, the structure is in place to support it once I get the back-end db right. Clicking a location for a Declaration or Definition jumps to the source:
This is the same source view you get via MXR, with the exception that I’ve altered the CSS, added context via the source tree on the left, and integrated dehydra type searches to replace ident searches where applicable. This could be much more intelligent, but for now, clicking a type name in the source takes you to the type itself vs. doing a search:
I’ll just stress once again that this is a demo before I give you a URL, in the hopes that you’ll be gentle and constructive with your feedback: http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/dxr.
I’d appreciate if you put comments about where I’m wrong with info in the dehydra xref on bug 435814. A huge thanks to Chris Tyler, Benjamin Smedberg, Ted Mielczarek, Taras Glek, Dave Mandelin, and the dozen odd people in #seneca who have been testing this for me.
You can also download the SQLite database here, if you want to play with the data itself. NOTE: I’ve indexed the following reversion of mozilla-central: 572802919ad2.
10 Comments
Looks fabulous!
Wow… impressive!
Will work great as a Prism App.
Really great!
Bookmark… er… starred
Awesome!
This looks like the start of a great new tool.
For the purposes of helping people get into the code, the big thing that seems to be lacking is documentation for the modules, classes and functions. It would take it to another level of usefulness if you could get doxygen support integrated in there too. Doxygen comments are used to document parts of the Mozilla code, and if you’re tool supported it, I’m sure that practice would spread to much of the rest of it.
Nice work!
That’s a really useful way of navigating the code base. bookmarked it too.
Any chance you could add /accessible to the diagram? We’d love it to be nice and visible
Hey Steve:
Yes, bsmedberg and I want to redo the diagram, as it’s wrong (missing things like accessible) and inaccurate in places. Really and truly just something that existed and I could use in a hurry.
Funnily enough, the test case I had as I worked on this project was accessible and nsIAccessible, nsPIAccessible, nsAccessible
Dave
Looks good… hope dehydra can handle the C portions at some point as well…
Also, you might want to look at doxygen stuff as well in addition to MDC for documentation.
Wow. So, how does it go, with the tab strip and the animation?! View > Source is… somewhat bare-bones! Firebug > Inspect just shows me a bunch of empty divs.
It must be bits of XUL, but ?? I can’t see any.js file loading a XUL file.
Show-stopper bug: it needs a lot of work for MSIE 7 compatibility
There is already promising work on C/objetive-C/objective-C++ frontends for xhydra on bug 421097, there’s a good chance that eventually it will handle those
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