Mozilla Debuts Sphinx-js for JavaScript Documentation

Firefox maker Mozilla has launched a new open source JavaScript tool called sphinx-js. Intended as an alternative for and complement to JSDoc, sphinx-js brings the capabilities of the Sphinx Python documentation project to JavaScript.

The sphinx-js website explains that the tool is especially well-suited to large JavaScript projects. “When you write a JavaScript library, how do you explain it to people? If it’s a small project in a domain your users are familiar with, JSDoc’s alphabetical list of routines might suffice. But in a larger project, it is useful to intersperse prose with your API docs without having to copy and paste things,” the website says. “sphinx-js lets you use the industry-leading Sphinx documentation tool with JS projects. It provides a handful of directives, patterned after the Python-centric autodoc ones, for pulling JSDoc-formatted documentation into reStructuredText pages. And, because you can keep using JSDoc in your code, you remain compatible with the rest of your JS tooling, like Google’s Closure Compiler.”

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