Having a hard time programming shell extensions

[Mario Wenzel <maweki gmail com>]

Hi Shell List,

recently I find myself having a hard time programming extensions for the 
gnome-shell. Most of the things I want to do, I have no idea how to 
start (or if it is possible with a sensible amount of work).

For the things I currently want to do with some extensions I would need 
to do OAuth2 and xml-Parsing. I have problems finding any documentation 
on how to do anything. We no longer even have an API-Browser. The linked 
browser on developer.gnome.org (http://docs.ptomato.name:9292/) no 
longer works.

Now also the Vala documentation at http://references.valadoc.org/ is 
offline.

I think the shell and shell-extensions is one of the first contact 
points for users that want to add functionality to their gnome 
experience and the barriers for that are just too high.

The lack of examples I can live with but the lack of API documentation 
for other languages than C makes it really hard for non-C-people like me 
to do anything.


How can we improve the experience for users on the gjs/shell-front?

Mario