Documentation

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Documentation

Clear and ubiquitous documentation is central to the Oorange philosophy. To begin with, all Oorange documentation exists in HTML format, and is directly accessible from within Oorange. There are several levels of documentation available:

Tutorials: There are currently nine tutorials describing various aspects of the Oorange system. These are intended for new users and cover the topics of overview, network editor, the Tcl/Objective C connection, 3D viewing, 2D viewing, animation, inspection, datagrids and functions, and adding new classes to Oorange. These can be loaded from Oorange into an HTML browser.

Class documentation: Oorange provides a documentation extraction system ``Objective-Doc'' [12], which acts on class interface files and source files to generate LaTeX or HTML files containing documentation including the following features:

automatic generation of class hierarchy above this class with links
class description
class and instance method names
instance variables
insertion of links to other classes or methods

Protocols and categories are handled similarly. The resulting documents are available through a Web-based class browser (Figure 4).

Node documentation: annotate methods (analogous to the nodeUpdate method) can be attached to any node script to provide node customized documentation for the node. This can be as simple as a character string to be displayed above the node icon, or an arbitrary HTML document can be loaded into the browser of your choice.

Search capability: The Web-based documentation is equipped with a general search capability.