(WDN) Development Network
 

I want to formally announce a project I have been working on the past few weeks, and decided to release now with patch 1.6.0

http://wdn.wowinterface.com (edited with new link)

this site is running on my personal site, but will be getting moved soon to wowinterface. I am calling it the wowinterface development network as it is a resource for developers to get comprehensive information about the ui, files, and methods for creating addons.

Features:

Version Patch Notes (finished) allows you to view the patch notes for each released version of the game.

Version Comparisons (finished) shows a deep file comparison and analysis of everything that physically changed in the FrameXML files per version.

Snapshots (finished) allows you to view the current files as they are in the live and test servers for the current client version. Basically a raw file viewer for the Interface/FrameXML directory.

LUA Reference Documentation (under development) a modified version of the LUA docs customized to only include WOW relevant data. WoW uses a subset restricted library of LUA functions and as such not everything in the full LUA 5 docs are relevant.

XML Reference Documentation (under development) compiles the formatting and organizational structure of the wow xml files.

API Reference Documentation (under development) is a comprehensive guide to the wow specific functions and handlers as defined in the live client.

Smippets & Tutorials (coming soon) will be an area in which custom code blocks are published for general consumption. Basically a place where developers can share ideas and code for easy access and organization of features...

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I was going to wait until the doc sections were done, but with the release of 1.6 I felt the community would want to see the version compares to better manage addon updates...

does it or if not could it mark the files that are different on the test and live servers?

that is in the comparison section. Test compares are a comparison of the test version and the live version at the time that test version was open...

So for this instance, test 1.6 is compared to live 1.5.1

Do you mean a comparison of test 1.6 to live 1.6?

I suppose either could be useful. since somtimes things do seem to change at the last min.

or at least reload 1.6 at launch, maybe have an extra star put by them somewhere.

next to the compare for the test server you should now see (from 1.5.1 live) and (to 1.6.0 live) which are both links to the compares for those two versions. Not much changed from test to live, but a little did...

thanks for the suggestion, I will be making it standard with future compares...

The version diffs are fantastic. Thanks!

I'm not sure why you are bothering with a whole new site for WoW API docs though. Isn't the WoW wiki a good start? Shouldn't the community focus on keeping one site up to date?

I think both sites are different enough... besides, you can't update Bela's site (only Bela can), so no worries that people will stop updating the wiki. Always good to have choices in case one site doesn't have what you're looking for you can look for it on the other ;)

it is just a different approach. As someone mentioned on the official forums, in the absence of Blizzard actually giving us definitive documentation like we should have, this is the next best thing. You have wowwiki which is used, updated, and maintained by the community, and you have my site that is compiled by a single person or group of people.

Neither site detracts or takes away from the other, they are merely different paths to the same end. I am sorry if this seems like a controversial move, as that wasn't my intention. It is just a personal preference of mine to have reference material that is all-encompasing and updated quickly. While I do use wowwiki, I find it terribly lacking in information, and I tend to end up finding the info on my own by looking at default UI code.

I have a feeling other people are the same way, and will never bother to post their findings on wowwiki. They either find what they need there, or they don't, and you never know otherwise. This is why an open system like that is both a blessing and a curse...

Sorry, didn't mean to come across in a negative way -- honestly I just wanted to understand your rationale. I don't know enough about the API yet to update the wiki, but I'm planning to someday. Would you mind if people link from the wiki to your site? (It would be really useful to link from an API definition to example Bliz code that uses and/or defines it.)

don't see a problem with that. That is what it is there for -- reference ;)

also feel free to provide any ideas on what you would like to see. Current things I am toying with as far as the documentation is as follows:

* obviously the name and description of a given function or whatever
* possibly a link that opens in code view the location of that function in the source file
* example output and/or usage

some of what I mentioned above may not make it into the first release, as it would take some coding to accomplish, but I am sure I can do it...

Invalid access to memory location.

or so your page says when I visit it. :(

sorry, I was developing some php and something I did crashed the application pool the site resides in. It is working now, sorry for that. I use the main site as my personal development / playground for all things web related, so once the dev site gets moved to wowinterface you should never see anything like that...

hehe, np. I figured it was something like that.

this site has been moved to the new wowinterface subdomain. You can still acccess it at the old link http://wdn.0ctavius.com and it will redirect to the new addy.

The new and correct addy however is http://wdn.wowinterface.com

Enjoy!

site updated through the 1.8 patch currently on the test server. I had to change the format for compares due to the changes that Blizzard made. Now compares take into account changes in the AddOns folder as well, since they now have Blizzard Addons located there. You can see the changes here:

http://wdn.wowinterface.com/module/F...0T/summary.xml

I will be tweaking the output a little, to make it easier to read and recognize folders versus files...

Thanks for your work on this.. it'd definitely a huge help when I'm working (at work) and need to take a look at the default UI code.

Having only proxy access to the internet and full SMS monitoring makes it kinda hard to get WoW installed and patched up :P

Being a Wiki, you are able to contribute to the WoW wiki and update it with the correct info!
When you find something missing to WoW wiki, you can add it :)

wow man this is pretty bad ass im just peekin it now....Update for 1.8 commin soon?

redesigned. I am getting more aggressive with updates. You should now see updates for every build that gets released, including mini-patches on the test server.

I also released a new design today that kind of simplifies the main interface. I have plans to modify the entire site in the coming days so that all pages pretty much flow together. You should now be able to easily access compares, patch notes, and even download archives of each specific version (saving you the trouble of exporting it yourself.

I have also converted the entire site into xml/xsl format. This should allow me to do some fancy new tricks, and include more comprehensive data in the coming weeks. I don't want to give anything away, but I hope to have a lot more details reporting soon. I am also working hard to alleviate a small issue I am now having with the actual compares. In some cases where files underwent major changes from a previous version, the xml file that contains the change information can be rather large. I ran into an xml file the other day that came out to 5mb, which is absolutely huge. I hope to have something soon to simplify these files as well as possibly compress them for faster loading. Stay tuned...

http://wdn.wowinterface.com

Great work, so easy to see how the schema changes and don't have to unpack a thing.

Thanks for your efforts Bela

had to take the comparison reports down temporarily, as well as the paptch notes. The recent patch messed up my timeline slightly, and forced me to rethink how I organize my compares. I have a new method figured out, and am already working on getting it up. The only downside is, now I have almost twice as many compares to do each patch.

The upside is, there will be MORE compares for you guys to look at :)

I will try to get everything back to full functional by tomorrow. I am taking a much needed break from working on it tonight, so that I can actually play wow for a change /wink

compares are done, and the layout has been modified slightly. Everything should be working fine so if you don't see compares for some versions, try hitting refresh on your browser.

Patch Notes will be up tomorrow...

Bela, thank you for your continued and ongoing work on this. I know it is an invaluable resource for a number of folks in the UI modding community. It's appreciated. :)

Diffs for download
 

As per Beladona's request, I'm posting the suggested diff facilities that the UI versions page should support:

* It should be possible to request "diffing" between any two arbitrary versions of the UI files
* It should be possible to download an individual diff for a single changed file, or
* It should be possible to download a complete diff, which is a concatenation of all diffs for all changed files
* The diff should be as humanly readable as possible, taken straight from the output of the UNIX diff command (without -c option), i.e. not a .patch file
* The concatenated diff that has all diffs should have the filenames (complete with relative path, e.g. AddOns\Blizzard_BattlefieldMinimap\Blizzard_BattlefieldMinimap.lua) inserted as separators

Thanks a lot!

First of all: Thanks a lot for your work :)

Now some suggestions:
- On the 'Version Comparison Summary' pages you have a statistic of changed/added/deleted stuff. Would it be possible to add such a statistic to the indivitual 'File Comparison Details' pages, too? Maybe even add the numbers behind the files in the list, too.
- does it make any sense to compare a new subrelease (eg 1.8.4) with the last test release? Most of the changes to the test release would have been reverted so I don't see usefull informtaion in that (just wondering, but I suppose it would be hader to have it skip those compares than to simply process them as all the others ^^)
- diffing between any versions as listed by Legorol would be nice, too

Well, thanks in advance :)

did the sub release comapre to the last test release simply to be complete. It is probably not necessary however.

I am working on an extremely revamped version of the site that will allow you to compare any version to any version. At the moment all file compares are html files, while everything else on the site is xml. The reason I did that is because the xml files I generated for the individual files were getting way too large. Unfortunately xml representation of data can cause that data to grow...

If each file was simply xml I could easily add the changes per file by editing a single xsl file, but alas due to all those files being html, I would need to change every single file, nubering in the thousands.

The new version should help alleviate that a lot, as it will generate those statistics on the fly, allowing me to simply store the archive like I do now, and grabbing data from the archive as needed..

updated with last test patch, and the recent push to live (1.9.0.4937)

Sorry for the delay, I was on vacation, and then wowinterface went through patch day slowness that prevented immediate updates to the site.

FYI: The last 2 versions uploaded are using a slightly different format for the file compares. When you view an actual file compare you will see what I mean. Large blocks of unchanged code is now being skipped in my output. I hated to do it, as I know some people like to view files in their entirety, however due to space and speed constraints I felt it necessary.

All previous versions will be getting updated to the new format as time permits.

http://wdn.wowinterface.com

Patch Notes are complete (minus some very large ones I have yet to convert, which will be done tonight)

For tracking purposes I am going to be listing feature requests that I am working on here.

Feature Requests in order of priority:

Way to view files directly without downloading them. This will be likely done via a script which views the contents of the zip files that are already provided for download. This way I do not need to upload the files directly, and can simply use what is already present on the server.

Downloadable Diffs - archives of diffs for each version, probably in multiple diff formats.

Ultimately I would like to have a way to view differences between ANY one version to ANY other. This needs EXTENSIVE testing and experimentation, as it needs to be simple and usable from an end-user's point of view, but still provide all of the functions an advanced user needs.

Optimizations and space savings. I am looking into ways to better store all diffs and view them without slowing down output. Ways may be to zip everyrthing and then view it from within the zip. This will also require extensive testing. Another idea is to store only the diffs, and get file contents from the archived files already present on the server. I can then dynamically apply diffs to them before outputting them to the browser.

Major update has been done on the site. I revamped the look, and started adding new features.

* One of the biggest new features was something requested by a few people who are active at wowwiki. Specifically they wanted a way to view only the latest files, and have a way to statically link to them. In other words, a link that can be put on wowiki to any particular file, and have it ALWAYS display the latest version of that file. Previously linking to any of teh "source code" views of any particular file meant that it was always the file for that specific version that you were linking directly to. This meant that you would need to update your links on the wiki, or elsewhere whenever you wanted it to show the current version.

To solve this, I added a section called "Latest Builds" which will automatically update itself with the file list for the last live and test versions that were uploaded as a compare on wdn. As soon as a compare becomes available for a specific version, the latest page updates to reflect this. In addition to this, any file linked to from this page will show 'live' or 'test' instead of the specific version. This forces the source code view to display the file for the latest live or test version of that file.

* I had a few small requests for easier links. This was actually something I wanted to mess with and experiment with anyway, as having tons of junk in the link made it look messy, and non-typing friendly. The alternative was to use mod-rewrite which intelligently takes directory style links and passes them to my php pages the way they should be. This is done in teh background so you don't need to worry how it is happening. The good news is that now instead of a link like:

http://wdn.wowinterface.com/detail.p...=live&report=5 (be warned, this likely will no longer work)

you now have links that look like this:

http://wdn.wowinterface.com/details/01205496/live/5

This gets even more pronounced and logical when looking at source code for files:
http://wdn.wowinterface.com/code/012...CombatText.lua
That makes MUCH more sense doesn't it? Oh and it gets better... As I mentioned passing live or test in place of the version for source code works, and will ALWAYS show the current version for either the live or test server. As an example:

http://wdn.wowinterface.com/code/111.../ChatFrame.xml
http://wdn.wowinterface.com/code/liv.../ChatFrame.xml

both those links go to the exact same file, and displays the source code. However when 1.12 goes live, the one that has "live" as the version will display the file for 1.12, not 1.11.2! This means that linking to the latter with "live" will ALWAYS show the current version of the file you want, and you don't need to update the link every time there is a new version!

That concludes my changes for tonight. Next up is a section that shows all of the functions defined in the interface files, and tells you where they are defined. I may even have them automatically open the source code for the file it is defined in, and jump to the line it is defined at...