I forgot to add to my last post some information about what I currently had in mind to improve about the API reference I’ve been working on. Any further suggestions people have are very welcome, but here is the current few ideas I have.

Currently it only indexes Firefox and Gecko interfaces, in fact it only indexes those used by an OSX build of Firefox. It would be nice to be able to index interfaces for all the main applications and for all the platforms. There are a couple of issues with this. Firstly I’d want the UI to work so people viewing it could select what set of interfaces they wanted to see. Secondly actually building the lists of interfaces for each application and OS is going to be pretty tricky I think. So far I’ve resorted to building Firefox then looking in dist/idl. This works but it is time consuming. Possibly I might be able to come up with some clever nonsense to make the build system only compile idls but we’ll see.

It would be nice to be able to include a list of the component contract ids available in the platform and what interfaces they implement. This is I think pretty difficult to do just by parsing the source files. Potentially a little extension could run in the app and do some looking through Components.classes to find this out. One issue here though is there is no way to tell whether components are services or not so instantiating them is potentially problematic. This is a problem that could be solved by brute force, or maybe doing a special instrumented build.

So those are my main two ideas, if anyone has any suggestions on how to make those tasks easier or for other things that should be there then shout them out.