API reference web page

Hey Cesium team,

As an occasional user of the Cesium website, I am really glad for all the work that you have done to enhance the user experience from a developer point of view. Things as tutorials, demos and how to guides are now easier to find and use, especially with the refurbished Learning Center :100:.

However, one area that looks odd is the CesiumJS API reference :thinking:. The design looks a bit old fashioned and I think that if the topics covered could be arranged in categories, they would be more easily discoverable. Generally, I feel that this part of the website should be refreshed to fit with the rest of the content.

If there is anything that I can do to help towards this direction or provide more feedback, please let me know. I would be happy to contribute to this effort :pray:

Hey Aristeidis, glad to hear you’ve found the revamped resources helpful!

I’m sure feedback is welcome on the CesiumJS API reference. I think a community proposed restructuring would be welcome. The API reference doc is currently generated with JSDoc. Maybe a natural type of automated category would be the class path (for example GeoJSONDataSource and CZMLDataSource would all be under “Datasources”, you’ll have core classes under “Core” etc).

I don’t know if JSDoc supports this out of the box - are there any API doc sites you or others really like/have found useful that would be good inspiration here? Or know any doc-generation tools you’ve used that you liked?

Hi @omar,

Thanks very much for your instant feedback :slightly_smiling_face: One of the tools that I have used before and I really liked it, was Gitbook. Really easy to use and with a nice user interface.
AFAIK there is an integration with JSDoc, you can find more details in this article https://medium.com/@kevinast/integrate-gitbook-jsdoc-974be8df6fb3. It essentially converts JSDoc to Markdown and then serves the content through Gitbook.

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We used the TS definitions to basically provide the documentation as hints in our IDE:

Mapshot.app.

Try typing / hovering over keywords.