I am trying to wrap my head around GoJS, and while the many examples are good, the api is hard for me to follow.
It’s unfortunate no one has written a technical book or in-depth intro videos on GoJS. Maybe someone has?
Sometimes when I try to find how to do a particular task using the api, it takes really long, and I’m not sure I’m doing things the “right way”. Why doesn’t each item listed within the api point to an example of that api being used?
Instead of searching within the GoJS site, I’m finding it’s better to do a google search. What if the GoJS site had search added to it? Consider the documentation for the Highcharts API or the AmCharts API (both js charting libraries) as examples.
I am working with AngularJS, but there is only one example using AngularJS. It would be nice if the big js frameworks had more integration examples.
If I want to “play” with a demo, I have to open another editor window on my machine to play with the examples download. It would be nice if the code examples were hosted in Plunker, because then it would much quicker and easier to start fiddling around with code examples, and if people have questions to post on the forum, having a common reference point might help.
This might be coming off as a rant, but I hope it can also be seen as constructive.
As it so happens, we’re working on videos at this very moment. We’d be interested in hearing what you’d want in such videos.
We do try to provide examples or point to samples in the API documentation. You might find the class documentation useful as a more detailed overview of that class’s functionality divided into subsets based on their combined purpose.
Yes – we’ve been training Google to improve searches. I frequently don’t remember exactly how to do something, so I just do a search for “gojs” and whatever terms I can think of. Lately I find that sometimes I don’t even need to include “gojs” as a search term. (And I’ve confirmed that to be true even in a private browser window.)
You can also search the code on the gojs.net site via GitHub: Search · · GitHub… But that assumes you know the word to look for.
Yes, we find it impossible to keep up with the plethora of JavaScript frameworks.
Some of us do use codepen or jsFiddle for answering questions, but personally I don’t like that as much because it’s impossible to search. In my personal directory I have another 331 sample apps demonstrating various features that answered someone’s question but that haven’t yet warranted cleaning up and making into a real sample app.
Nice to hear about videos. I’d have to think a little more about what would be nice. Probably more in-depth about how to “think” in GoJS - how to grasp the most important high-level concepts, how the pieces fit together.
RE: Class documentation.
That’s one of the things I think could be drastically improved.
Offer a site like the highcharts api, or the amcharts api. This would give an easier way to explore the api (especially the search feature). For each class member, there could be a direct link to a live example that uses the class constructor / property / method / constant.
RE: codepen or plunker or jsfiddle
Is there a reason all the existing examples could not be placed on codepen or other such site? Again, this is a nice touch vendors like highcharts and amcharts provide - their demos point to online code editors that allow you to play with the demo; a very useful feature…
And I fork that sample, modify it and give them that.
But beyond that, I’m not sure there’s too much advantage to having all the samples on codepen. Putting all of them there creates another place to maintain and keep up to date. There’s a minor drawback of people finding forked or older samples and using those instead of the most up to date ones.
One thing that could potentially help people is to have diagrams (I don’t mean GoJS diagrams) showing at a high level the different ways in which the elements of a GoJS diagram can be put together and how they are hierarchically related.
Imagine a number of diagrams - something like this, and there would have to be more than a few diagrams - with the name of the GoJS Class(es) corresponding to each box inside of the box.
