Re: Developer Docs
The developer's docs do not really constitute a developer's guide, like in other eshop platforms, where there are comprehensive developer's guides. X-Cart 5 developer's docs are rather fragments that give a very small picture of the internals of XCart.
For example, some important chapters that should not be missing, can be:
1. A description of the X-Cart architecture, listing it's layers, functional components (eg, cart, shipping, payments, products, etc) with any logic flow diagrams that depict the main logic routes regarding their function, so the main logic in each component can be described and understood. In these diagrams, also, the various patterns could be depicted (eg the Decorator patterns on which xcart 5 is mainly based, regarding it's module development).
This, could be the starting point from which more extensive description of each component in depth could be written, referring also to important code snippets, regarding main functions in each component.
2. A description of the database (tables, fields, primary keys, index keys, etc). The tables, I guess, could be separated in groups related to the function of each of the components referred in the previous paragraph.
The main associations between the database tables should also be described (table relations with foreign fields referred).
(I understand that in xcart 5, we don't deal with relational database tables in the code, but rather with objects created from mapping the table structure to an object structure, but I just use relational database terminology in order to be more comprehensible).
Surely, there are many more issues that could be discussed further.
As a general notice, from what I have read through a few developer's docs articles, there are various errors in the text, like words missing, broken links, orthographic errors, making it seem like draft text that has not been run through a second time, in order to correct any errors.
I hope I am wrong, but I don't see any willingness from Qualiteam to ever write a comprehensive developer's manual/guide.
I would guess, just by common sense, that the company must have a well formulated developer's guide, or at least organized and comprehensive notes for it's programmer team.
How else could a new programmer in the team be trained in a reasonable amount of time, in order to be able to code fast and properly?
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