Refactor the Appendix section in the reference documentation [SPR-16045]

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev opened SPR-16045 and commented

The Appendix used to have links to What's New and the Migration guides on the Wiki. Lots of people couldn't find it there -- it's not a very logical to check. Those are now removed from the Appendix and are instead mentioned on the index page. They're important enough and What's new used to be the start of the reference.

From the remaining content, some needs to be trimmed like the classic ORM and AOP usage.

The XML schema configuration could move to the "Core Container" section, at the bottom. Arguably, in this new section-based structure, it would be more useful there, as a local Appendix of sorts. It does not alone justify having a top-level Appendix section.

The form tags reference is of marginal value. The API docs already lists all Tag classes and methods. We could make sure the API docs have the same amount of information (even including HTML tables in class level Javadoc) and then simply refer to the Javadoc form the reference without bloating the size of the content.

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Affects: 5.0 GA

Issue Links:

• Top-level "Language Support" reference section [SPR-16044] #20593 Top-level "Language Support" reference section

Referenced from: commits e5a5677, eea8ee2

[spring-projects-issues]

Rossen Stoyanchev commented

XML schema information from the top-level Appendix is now broken up and distributed into a local appendix in each of the Core Container, Data Access, and Integration sections respectively. This follows the more recent pattern to bring such information closer to the source. For example the MVC namespace was never in the top-level appendix but rather side by side with the MVC Java config in the Web section.

Spring JSP tag library and Spring Form tag library reference information has been migrated to Javadoc. At the package level there is a listing of all tags. At the class level, each tag includes the same information including an HTML table with all attributes. In other words no loss of information but rather a consolidation so there is a single source. In many cases as it turns out the Javadoc had a better and more class-level information about each tag while the reference had a better summary by attribute.