"DITA and Markdown and Docker, oh my…" presented by John Kirkilis at DITA-OT Day 2022
Nokia’s Cloud and Network Services is one of three major business groups in Nokia, all of which use DITA and DITA-OT for the great majority of customer-facing documentation. Unlike Nokia’s Mobile Networks or Network Infrastructure groups, CNS focuses entirely on software for both cloud and core network solutions and services. With the advent of co-authoring between DITA content from Technical Writers and Markdown content from R&D developers, Lw-DITA and the Lw-DITA OT-plugin have now become key aspects of our documentation ecosystem. The CNS User Assistance Tools team has implemented a dozen OT Plugins, and leverages Ant, Maven, Git, and Jenkins plugins to support both local documentation builds on writers’ workstations as well as CI builds on a server farm orchestrated by Kubernetes. By packaging our Maven, Ant, and DITA-OT customizations into separate Docker layers, we're able to allow R&D pipelines to build the corresponding documentation during a software build to support rapid CI/CD deployments going forward.
With the generation of OT Project files by our pipeline, we were able to further eliminate the need for some of our previous scaffolding. Local workstation builds are facilitated by OxygenXML SDK plugins to marshal writer configuration info to OT. Unit testing of our OT customizations is accomplished using a combination of XSpec, AntUnit and Jenkins. The next wave of OT plugins will support OpenAPI3 conversion to DITA in a pre-process plugin and to Markdown. We will also be enriching our content to better support modern presentation solutions, including the application of machine learning and AI-assisted solutions.