Tag Archives: vala

Rygel Documentation

Over the last few months, I have worked on Rygel‘s documentation, along with Krzesimir Nowak and Jens Georg here at Openismus. Most of that work is now finished. It’s been a great investment of time that should be of real benefit to the project.

We’ve massively improved Rygel’s (C) API documentation, which was rather bare after Rygel’s initial split into shared libraries. We had to investigate how the current plugins use the API, and sometimes improved the API in response. (The very latest API documentation improvements will be online soon, when we do a new Rygel release.)

We’ve added both simple and real-world examples, linking to them from sections in the API documentation and describing how those examples work. Those real-world examples are standalone GStreamer-0.10-based versions of the regular Rygel media engine and of its media-export server plugins, plus a GStreamer-0.10 version of the standalone renderer example.The original code for these (now using GStreamer-1.0) was in Vala, like the rest of Rygel, so we had to convert them to C. To maintain functionality, we chose to clean up the horribly-obfuscated C code generated by Vala. That took us a few frustrating weeks to finish but we got it done.

The new Rygel Integration page provides an overview of the APIs that platforms should find interesting, linking to the various documents that we’ve created during this effort. That Integration page is part of a complete overhaul of Rygel’s wiki project pages to make them more attractive and useful.

To help with maintenance of Rygel itself, we now have a Rygel Architecture page with descriptions of Rygel’s program flow in various situations, and a Rygel architecture diagram showing how the various parts of Rygel work together.