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Re:J2EE Is Dead - Completely Dead by gaustin on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @08:42AM (#2004086)
For a few reasons, I had to take a job maintaining/enhancing some huge government Java applications (largely Oracle based). I thought that there was some interesting things going on in the ecosystem because of what I read about all of the JVM-based hacking. I thought that because all of this hacking there would be a lot of solid, well integrated tools and good documentation.

I had successfully avoided Java for most of my career, so it was also an opportunity to learn something new.

That was a terrible mistake. It's almost impossible to find answers that are relevant. There is very little readable documentation, even directly from Oracle. When you do find a relevant bit of information on a forum or blog, it's either outdated or useless because the author doesn't specify what their environment is.

I asked my colleagues for books, blogs or other resources to help me get up to speed. They pretty much laughed and said I'm out of luck.

I won't complain about the tooling. It's bad, but that may be more a matter of taste than anything else.

Re:J2EE Is Dead - Completely Dead by retube on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @08:50AM (#2004104)
I have to respectfully disagree. The docs of just about every java library or framework I've looked at or used have been extensive, detailed and complete.
Re:J2EE Is Dead - Completely Dead by pjscott on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @10:14AM (#2004399)
But are they readable? Relevant? Useful? They're certainly better than nothing, but there's more to good documentation than completeness and detail.
Re:J2EE Is Dead - Completely Dead by gaustin on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @11:18AM (#2004609)
I wonder how much overlap there is between the packages I've used and the ones you've used. I've only been in the Java world for about 3 months, so my perspective is definitely raw and incomplete. Maybe we just have different criteria for what we consider good documentation.