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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!

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  • The Java 7 API Docs look a bit different… But I agree there's room for improvement. Commented Jul 4, 2011 at 15:33
  • Note that there was strong resistance to the first versions of Scaladoc 2 -- because, to be honest, it was inferior to Javadoc-like Scaladoc. It was quite a few iterations before it got usable, and only recently it got a decent css. Commented Jul 4, 2011 at 19:12
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    Same kind of question was asked here: stackoverflow.com/questions/1026553/… Commented Jul 4, 2011 at 20:19
  • @paradigmatic: I was about to link that ;-) And just as I did there, I do recommend the JavaDoc search frame to everyone here as well! Commented Jul 6, 2011 at 7:18

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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.

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all right, so they added CSS, which is great, but it does not improve the usability, which is the main problem from my point of view
Like I said - give them some time :)
There was always (at least, since 1.2 or such) a way to use a custom stylesheet for Javadoc (see the -stylesheetfile option). Maybe now they changed the HTML output to be easier styleable, though.
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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.

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Those HTML pages were made using the Javadoc tools, a standard way to build documentation in Java.

I don't know if there are other webpages with a better formatting of the API, but if it helps you with anything, and you are using an IDE and the SDK, you can see the source code for most of the files there.

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JavaDoc was designed to be the lowest common denominator. Virtually any web browser can display it, even without JavaScript support.

If you are looking for quicker access and search capabilities, you can access JavaDoc from within an IDE such as Eclipse.

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Yes, I think it simply was good enough. I don't really need a search function.

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