Geomajas Community Documentation

1.2. Documentation

The general documentation is split in three books.

  • developers guide: guide for developer who want to use Geomajas in their application.

  • contributors guide: guide for people who want to contribute to the project or want to know more about the functioning of the project (this one).

  • end user guide: documentation for end users of applications built using Geomajas.

Apart from that, each face and each plug-in has their own documentation.

All documentation is written in docbook format to allow both PDF and HTML output formats. The sources can be found in the "documentation" directory of the project.

For editing the docbook files, we recommend using XMLMind. The personal version is free and can (at the time of writing) be used for editing open source documentation.

The docbook files are currently formatted using XMLMind. When using another tool for editing, please keep the current formatting to assure diffs remain usable.

The documentation includes a lot of examples which are excerpts from the source of the example applications. This prevents copy-paste mistakes. The build process for the documentation automatically updates these excepts. The directories which have to be scanned for excepts are specified in the pom. When this includes code which is not in the current versioned entity (the root directory for the face or plug-in), then the source needs to be obtained from a dependency and unpacked. Excerpts can be annotated using annotations like

<!-- @extract-start AllowAllSecurity, Allow full access to everybody -->
<bean name="security.securityInfo" class="org.geomajas.security.SecurityInfo">
    <property name="loopAllServices" value="false"/>
</bean>
<!-- @extract-end -->

for XML or

// @extract-start filename, title
for (String line : lines) {
    // do something
}
// @extract-end

for java files. The start annotation includes the filename which should be used (all files are placed in the "listing" directory) and optionally a title for the example.