Bedrijfsbeschrijving
Luminis
Arnhem
Alex van Beek
Context
During development engineers benefit from a solid product design spec. For front-end engineers, specification often consists of screen mockups created by a designer. Style aspects like dimensions, colors and fonts need to be extracted from these mockups by the engineer, and this often proves to be a tedious and error-prone job. Especially when working simultaneously with multiple front-end on a product, the need for a better, more specific design spec increases. The same goes for designers by the way; they also benefit from a good design spec to keep the design consistent.
Opdracht
A living style guide automatically generates documentation of style aspects by interpreting the (annotated) CSS in a project. This is typically part of the build process. It aims to always keep the style documentation and CSS synchronised, much like products like JavaDoc. The idea of a living style guide is not new, many products already exist today that do this. These products have some drawbacks though. Most importantly, they are very hard to use by anyone that is not an engineer.
This living style guide is different, because it:
- is easier to integrate into a build process,
- can also be used as a stand-alone application,
- has a simple annotation structure,
- offers templates and easy customisation of the style guide itself,
- offers multiple output formats, like HTML, PDF and Word,
- automatically publishes changes and sends (throttled) notifications.
Build integration
The product is extremely easy to integrate into an automated build process, with a minimum of configuration required.
Stand-alone
The product can also be used outside of a build process, for example by dragging a ZIP containing all CSS onto a webpage that will then parse and publish the documentation.
Simple annotations
The annotations in the CSS are needed for the product to correctly parse it into documentation. The annotations are human-readable and use descriptive terms that are easy to understand.
Templates & customisation
The product offers multiple templates and customisation options for the output documentation. This will ensure the documentation itself looks well, matches the client’s corporate style and is easy to read and use.
Output formats
Documentation is generated in one or multiple of the following formats: HTML, PDF, plain text or Word.
Publish & notify
After generating the documentation the product will either save the files into a designated folder or publish it online. When changes have been made, daily or weekly e-mail notifications with a summary of these changes are send.
Keywords
- Java
- Build (CI) integration & stand alone
- Parsers