HACKING.markdown

Hacking on Annotator

Quick setup for lazy people (on a Mac)

$ ./tools/setup

Slower introduction for industrious people (and those on Linux/Windows)

If you wish to develop Annotator, you'll need to have a working installation of Node.js (v0.8.x). Once installed (on most systems Node comes bundled with NPM) you should run the following to install Annotator's development dependencies.

$ npm install .

The Annotator source is found in src/, and is written in CoffeeScript, which is a little language that compiles to Javascript. See the CoffeeScript website for more information.

dev.html loads the raw development files from lib/ and can be useful when developing.

The tests can be found in test/spec/. You can run the tests in your browser (using test/runner.html), but while you're working it's probably easiest to run the tests using npm test from the root of the repository. This will require PhantomJS and the mocha runner:

$ npm install -g phantomjs mocha-phantomjs

For inline documentation we use TomDoc. It's a Ruby specification but it also works nicely with CoffeeScript.

Tools

There are a number of useful development tools shipped in the tools/ directory.

$ ./tools/build      # compiles src/*.coffee and test/*.coffee into lib/*.js
$ ./tools/watch      # like the above, but automatically recompiles files when they change
$ ./tools/test       # runs the test suite with PhantomJS

Building the packaged version of Annotator involves running the appropriate make task. For example:

$ make                     # build everything
$ make bookmarklet         # build the bookmarklet
$ make annotator plugins   # build annotator and individual plugin files.