If you have a Curl NITRO project and you want to have, say, the documentation for the Curl opensource web toolkit available as a library which you can search when working in Curl7, just add 7.0 to the WSDK docs manifest.mcurl file.

For example, I unzipped the 1.0.6 WSDK zip into a Curl7 folder and then went to my

C:\Curl7\WSDK_071120\docs-install\WSDK

and changed the manifest header to

{curl 6.0, 7.0 manifest}

This only means that I can search across those Curl 6 API docs when doing a Curl 7 project without the documentation viewer complaining about a version inconsistency.

If you haven't added documentation before, it is very straight-forward: just open the HELP menu of the doc viewer (the 'help' window of the Curl IDE.) You will want to select a manifest.mcurl that is in a folder designated as being the 'documentation' version of a package such as the WSDK.

The nice thing about the viewer is that if you close it, close your project and then open a Curl 5 project, the documentation in HELP will now be whatever you have selected (i.e. installed) as your Curl 5 documentation.

Documentation for your own code can be improved by using the macro's {doc } and {doc-next } which are detailedin the Contents menu of the Curl Documentation Viewer in the section

Curl IDE User's Guide

under the heading

Documenting Your Application

Of course, as you may recall, COBOL programmers document best while sleeping.

This afternoon I was looking at whether much was new over at the folks who took over Metacard when I stumbled into the Google 'Android' code project.

The link to an XML example of a UI layout was a good reminder of why we love Curl.

A UI layout is typically hierarchical and models a containment structure, but a comparison of that XML to a comparable Curl declarative layout could be misleading: and that is because in addition to that XML there is still all of the Java code required to to get that little UI up and running.

What Google may be after is the mobile market (OpenLaszlo may be the competitor they have in their sights) and perhaps they can rely on the perception that competant java UI developers are cheap and plentiful.. But the reality may be a little different if there is any big demand for Android app's. Because tolerance for bugs in mobile software is, well, you know, low: the thing has gotta work. Those little gadgets are, well, kinda personal ... and we rely on them in corporate life when we are far removed from any friendly, near-my-cubicle rescue-techie.

Just what Dilbert needed: an Android running on Java ...

It might be fun to parse some of the example XML as UI spec's for a Curl applet ... stay connected; more to follow.

My second iteration has added another TocDocument but this one has a procedure to populate an index entry and its pages.

That procedure might also be a place to add the values to a printable container should a user wish to print the index.

The procedure definition below follows the declaration of 2 variables which we will populate on each call.

{let public v1:#Visual, v2:#Visual}
{define-proc public {idx-entry entry:String, pages:String}:(Visual, Visual)

The procedure returns two visual objects which ensures that all entries and pages are formatted with the same look-n-feel.

A typical call might be

{set (v1, v2) = {idx-entry "parse", "369"}}
{heading level=4, {value v1}}
{heading level=5, {value v2}}

which is often preferrable to the simpler, error-prone and no-fun-to-maintain repetition of sequences such as

{heading
level=4,
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent = 0.25in,
{bold parse}
}
}
{heading
level=5,
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent = 0.50in,
{text
text-preserve-whitespace?=true,
text-breakable?=false,
369
}
}
}

for each entry.

With the simple abstraction which the procedure provides, we can change the layout in one place and we can consider adding a facility such that the user could customize the index and retain their changes as client-side persistent data. All of which points to a role for Curl in The-Future-of-the-Book, n'est-pas?

The complete procedure follows:

{define-proc public {idx-entry entry:String, pages:String}:(Visual, Visual) || TocTreeItem
{return
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent = 0.25in,
{bold {value entry}}},
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent = 0.50in,
{text
text-preserve-whitespace?=true,
text-breakable?=false,
{value pages}
}
}
}
}

You no doubt see many opportunities to improve this (the user is required to remember to add spaces between page numbers or otherwise format the string of page numbers; there are no options yet to control the font, emphasis etc)