The 8.0 beta release brought a new documentation system with it. The new system improves navigation, search and language filtering and color schema has incorporated with the new website look and feel.
The new documentation ships with the new db4o releases and is available on the db4o 8.0 documentation section on the website.
Improved Search And Navigation
If you've been struggling to find what you were looking for in the old reference documentation you will see considerable improvements with the new system. Besides better search results, it also highlights the results, so you can immediately spot the relevant information. There's a regular "Search" which searches through the whole documentation and a "Quick Search" which only searched in the current topic.
Additionally there are the new 'Index' and 'Glossary'-sections. The index is a handpicked selection of all important topics and concepts. The glossary explains frequently used terms. The "Favourites" folder allows you to save topics and successful searches.
The new documentation is frame-based, therefore we provide "Direct Link" link in each topic, which can be used to share links, referring to exact location in the documentation.
Improved PDF
The PDF-version has greatly improved. The PDF-version contains now a proper table of content, which makes navigation more pleasant. The text formatting and layout of the pages has been improved as well.
Improved Language Filtering
The reference documentation is now better separated between the different platforms. Topics applicable to Java won't appear in .NET version anymore and vice versa. Platform specific terms are used when possible. For example when the Java-version uses terms like getter/setter, jar-files the .NET version uses the equivalent terms like properties and assemblies.
Single Source and Version Control
The new documentation is kept in our SVN-repository, along with the regular db4o source-code. This allow easy versioning and traking of changes, so that the documentation is in sync with the db4o-releases. Also this single source is use used to generate all language versions and both PDF and HTML content.
You can find the source for the documentation here: https://source.db4o.com/db4o/trunk/reference/Flare/.
Future Improvements
A lot of these features have not reached their full potential yet. Most of the content has been ported from the old documentation and needs to be reviewed to take advantage of the new system. As we improve the content, we also try to take more advantage of the system. Let us know when you find any usability, formatting or content issues by submitting JIRA-tasks. Suggestion for all improvements are alway welcome.