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Documentation doesn't explain what ender does #180

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fresheneesz opened this issue Aug 1, 2013 · 1 comment
Open

Documentation doesn't explain what ender does #180

fresheneesz opened this issue Aug 1, 2013 · 1 comment

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@fresheneesz
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fresheneesz commented Aug 1, 2013

I'm not trying to troll, just trying to A. help you improve your documentation while B. helping me understand ender and figure out whether I should use it over browserify or require.js.

The intro in http://ender.jit.su/ explains a couple things:

  1. The high level thing it is - its a package manager and dependency compiler
  2. What its not
  3. The problem its trying to solve

After the intro it dives right into:
4. ender usage

What is clearly left out is what ender does and how it does it. This is very important information for someone like me trying to figure out why I would use ender over browserify for example. The overview section gives examples that are very clearly incomplete - this also doesn't help people get started with ender. My browser doesn't have a require method and neither does yours, so how does that require get defined? What kinds of things are produced by those command line actions in the overview? What do they do, why would I be running them?

I literally still have basically no idea how ender works or how its different from the other tools I'm considering. The documentation was clearly written by someone who deeply and intuitively understands ender, however what that means is that the documentation is written non-linearly and is difficult to understand. Its a pretty page, and its probably a good reference, but its not a good introduction.


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@ded
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ded commented Aug 14, 2013

Hi there. I suppose it can be a little tricky getting started. Ender is essentially a build tool that gives you require in the browser, and also gives you a jQuery-like interface. It also bundles and minifies packages found in npm.

The "how" is perhaps less important (unless you want to start contributing). Generally, you keep a list of dependencies in a package.json and tell ender to build it.

ender build path/to/package/dir

It then sorts out the dependency list, and builds it into a single ender.js file of which you can include on your webpage.

<script src="ender.js"></script>

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