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Local HTML docs for Prototype

Posted: Wed, 3 June 2009 | permalink | No comments

Having (temporarily) flung myself back into a bit of professional Rails app development, I'm doing a JS-heavy site (just to maximise the WTF factor). Since I'm Old Skool, I'm going with Prototype, as it's the javascript library I'm least unfamiliar with.

The problem, though, is that I do about a fifth of my work on the train, where I don't have access to the Internet, and the Prototype people haven't seen fit to provide a downloadable version of the docs in HTML. There's a PDF[1], (which lacks any sort of hyperlinking (how very 1990s) and whose page numbering in the TOC doesn't match up to the PDF page numbers), and a CHM which has hyperlinks that don't work half the time. Apart from that, all the docs are online-only, and not very scraping-friendly (wget --mirror doesn't rewrite links correctly when you're also mangling the filenames for local-friendly access -- patch in the making if I can be arsed).

So, long story short, I need a non-traditional way to get myself some local docs. Turns out it isn't as hard as it sounds, as evidenced by the below command list:

	git clone git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/prototype.git
	cd prototype
	git submodule init
	git submodule update
	sudo gem install treetop
	rake doc:build

This will peg your CPU for an inordinate amount of time (a smidge over 10 minutes for me; -j 3 would have made things a lot quicker), but you'll end up with a doc/index.html which has some useful stuff in it. It'll look nothing like what's on the website, but it's something, and should be enough to keep me going on those long, lonely train journeys.

1. which looks like someone should be expecting a C&D from O'Reilly for look and feel, unless it's a semi-sooper-sekrit O'Reilly production that they don't want to put their name to directly.