Java API interface

Question

Ever since I started playing around with Scala, I have had one big question concerning the Java API: why does Oracle keep the same old HTML page with "frameset" tags and no search function at all? It looks like they haven't made it to the Web 2.0...

The Scala API documentation on the other hand, while not the best website in the web history, is several orders of magnitude more usable.

Anyways, if anybody knows why that is and, more importantly, if there exists a Java API documentation with a better interface, please let me know!

Answer 1

Recently, for Java 7, JavaDoc was improved so it could use custom CSS. Here are the first results: http://download.java.net/jdk7/docs/api/. The work continues and I think we'll see more when new updates come out. I do agree that ScalaDoc is superior, but they didn't have to deal with 15 years of legacy.

Answer 2

Javadocs provides the output in that format and its published at that address, I guess no one really saw the need for improvement, but now that you mention it, it makes for an interesting side-project. I googled around to find if there was any "better" interface but no luck.

You could run javadoc -h to see what extra options are available if you want to re-generate the javadocs. Some interesting ones are to provide custom header/footer and linking to the source, but nothing to the effect that you are asking.