Chris Hitchcott (Digix Core Dev)

This week I’ve been working on tests and documentation; more tests, and better docs.

Problem:

We wanted to use Solidity’s [natspec] feature to document contract methods. Basically, it means you can document your code within your code, as comments, that can be used by other developers or end users to gain a better understanding of what a contract does.

Unfortunately I found out that there currently wasn’t a way of automatically creating a documentation website.

Solution:

As there was no tool for this, we had to build our own, which I did this week. Today we are releasing the alpha version of Doxity, the world’s first (as far as I know) documentation generator built specifically for Solidity. There are some features still missing (check todos in readme) pending an update from Solidity compiler, but we can now automatically generate a nicely formatted website displaying the documentation for the contracts within a given project.

Check out the demo here: https://hitchcott.github.io/doxity-demo/docs/MetaCoin/

One day, we might even integrate web3/testrpc into the frontend and generate a GUI for making calls/transactions, so that you can manually test methods in your browser!