I've been mulling over this problem of Fantom examples for some time now (as it's been brought up a couple of times in the past) and here are some thoughts:

Problem

So you need Fantom examples, and lots of them. The problem is two-fold:

• people who have questions and need examples don't know the answers
• people who have the answers, don't know the questions

This website isn't a great media for hunting down examples or answers to specific questions because:

• search results are a mix of reference documentation and forum posts
• forum posts are often too advanced for newcomers...
• ...which acts as a barrier for people wanting to ask simple questions
• answers to forum questions are not immediate

Tell Me About...

Something I noticed when I was learning Fantom, is that the reference documentation is extremely complete and contained all the answers I needed. I also noticed that it is very, very hard to find what you need, and google search results are very hit and miss (due to forum postings, et al).

So I was thinking of a better way to index and search the Fantom documentation, and came up with Tell Me About:

Documentation headings are pretty descriptive, so I indexed and ranked them for one word searches. An engine then supplies instant snippets of documentation, complete with links to the Fantom website.

I've quickly prototyped it, and made it available as a simple script here:

Tell Me About on IDEone - http://ideone.com/Rrwjx3

You should be able to run the script on IDEone and try it out yourself.

Whereas running it as a script and viewing text output may be of limited use, I'm thinking of running it on a simple one-page website as a subdomain of either Fantom-Factory or Fantom-Lang.

To re-itereate, the Fantom documentation is actually pretty good, and I'd hope that a tool like this would help expose it more.

For completeness, a sample search currently looks like this:

> fan tellMeAbout pods

(Documentation)
http://fantom.org/doc/docLang/Pods

docLang
  Pods

Pods are the top of Fantom's namespace as well as the unit of deployment.  A
pod's name is globally unique and is used to organize the top level of Fantom's
namespace.  In this respect pods serve the purpose of both a Java package and a
JAR file (or .NET namespace and DLL).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Documentation)
http://fantom.org/doc/docLang/Structure#pods

docLang
  Structure
    2. Pods

Pods are the top of Fantom's namespace as well as the unit of deployment.  A
pod's name is globally unique and is used to organize the top level of Fantom's
namespace. Pod names are similar to Java packages or C# namespaces.  To
guarantee uniqueness, try use a naming convention which won't produce conflicts
(see [conventions]`Conventions#naming`).

...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Documentation)
http://fantom.org/doc/docLang/Pods#meta

docLang
  Pods
    2. Pod Meta

Pods do not use [Facets]`Facets` for metadata like types and slots.  Rather pod
metadata is managed as name/value pairs.  Key metadata about your pod is defined
in the [build script]`docTools::Build#buildPod`:

...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Type)
http://fantom.org/doc/sys/Pod

sys
  Pod

Pod represents a module of Types.  Pods serve as a type namespace
as well as unit of deployment and versioning.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Method)
http://fantom.org/doc/sys/Type#pod

sys
  Type
    pod()

Parent pod which defines this type.  For parameterized types derived
from List, Map, or Func, this method always returns the sys pod.

Examples:
  Str#.pod         => sys
  acme::Foo#.pod   => acme
  acme::Foo[]#.pod => sys

I'd be interested in hearing any thoughts before I surge ahead!

Steve.

You are reading my mind. This morning I was using a Sqlite database to index Fantom's pods. Nowadays I'm off-line most of the day and I wanted a search tool. Although I prefer to use a database to index the content I think you had a great idea. I look forward to use it. Likewise.