Today is jassdocs 10th birthday! That’s pretty cool. But it is only one part of the jassbot website you are probably using. So let me take this opportunity today to write about all the parts that make up the website. Let’s start with the project du jour: jassdoc is like javadoc but for jass. I started the repo to unify some documentation projects like thehelper-wiki and various threads on hive and wc3c. And that documentation progress went on – slowly, but steady – since then. Sometimes by me, but more often by an increasing amount of contributors, which i want to extend a thank you to. And a special shoutout to Luashine, the only other person with commit rights :)
You can read these docstrings just fine in the source code, and people do that for sure, yet personally i prefer a bit of a richer interface. So amongst the annotated jass files lie a collection of scripts to parse the docstrings and put them and a bunch of other metadata into an sqlite file. A convinient browser for that sqlite-file is the jassbot web interface, which of course is also open source.

The web-interface went through a few iterations, but the most recent as of now is written using the flask framework. But the framework doesn’t matter that much as we don’t do anything fancy really – except maybe the dynamic syntax-highlighter generation based off of the jassdoc sqlite file. And the search of course. But the search is yet another project, the one the website got its name from: jassbot. jassbot started as a hoogle clone for jass. At first it was confined to the command line, and then to an IRC-channel. But i guess command line and IRC-channels aren’t the biggest crowd pleasers, so i added an HTTP interface to jassbot and just talk to it via the flask app.

I have been a round in the WarCraft 3 scene for a bit, so i saw projects come and go, source code being lost, websites shut down. And while i don’t intend to stop hosting jassbot any time soon it was still very important to me to have it all in the open, to make it possible to preserve it and to for others to host it if wanted. With that being said, onward to the next ten years!