i’m going to get better…

Someday I’m going to get better about regularly updating this blog.

Anyhow, Laura and I are in escrow on a townhouse in San Dimas. It’s a ~1700 sq. ft, 3 bed/2.5 bath, 2 car attached garage type of house. It was build in 1989 and has a few recent updates. We’re hoping to close in the beginning part of August.

I’ve been building some tools at work recently. I was developing by myself and management decided to add another deveoper to the mix. Going over the project and how everything worked, she felt that I had a lack of documentation, so I’ve been tasked with adding documentation to the project. The frontend is a php-mysql based app and the backend is a mixture of bash shell scripts and perl scripts to import data to the DB. For documenting the perl scripts, I’m going to use POD documentation as I’m fairly familiar with it and not having it in my scripts was more of an oversight than anything. This left me with trying to decide how to document the PHP code. Since perl has POD, I felt that I should find out if there was anything like it for php. Some searching around and it seems like the defacto-standard for PHP documentation is phpDocumentor.

I set it up on my dev box and started playing with it….i’m really starting to like it. This is my first time using it, so I know I’m not taking full advantage of all the features yet, but it outputs nice, clean documentation and isn’t too obtrusive in the source code. Finally, since it’s very similar to javadoc, if I ever grow up and start doing more Java, I’ll be familiar enough with the format that it should be a breeze to document any Java code I write.

My only problem with the whole thing is now I have to document 20 classes and about 15 or so pages. Not a big deal, but it just takes time.