"Daniel Dyer" <"You don't need it"> wrote in message
news:op.tpnti5as8kxvgr@jack.local...
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:06:52 -0000, Oliver Wong
> wrote:
>
>>
>> "Knute Johnson" wrote in message
>> news:8LFKh.104715$Ju2.80513@newsfe16.lga...
>>> leskaPaul wrote:
>>>> I'm not able to get to the website; my precious API documentation!
>>>> Neither is anyone in my office.
>>>>
>>>> Is anyone else experiencing this?
>>>>
>>>
>>> You don't keep a local copy? You bandwidth squanderer you!
>>
>> Isn't there a local copy automatically included with the JDK (in
>> "src.zip", I believe?)
>>
>
> The API documentation is a separate download (probably due to its
> considerable size). Src.zip is the source code only (but you could of
> course generate the Javadocs from it).
Right, this is what I was referring to. A "good" IDE should be able to
automatically extract the javadoc-encoded comments from the Src.zip and
present an interface for browsing through it which is as easy to use as a
webbrowser browsing through the HTML-form of the javadocs. Eclipse can do
this, for example.
One advantage to this over the webbrowser approach is that I can
transparently access the javadocs for all my JARs without worrying about
where those JARs came from, whereas with a webbrowser, I might have to
think "Who wrote this library? Apache? Some random guy? Better go to the
homepage and look around for where the online API is stored".
Another is that you still have access to the JavaDocs, even with
Internet problems.
One last that I can come up with off the top of my head is that your
JavaDocs are much more likely to be "synchronized" with the version of the
library you're actually using, whereas you might have to pay extra
attention that you're when you're using a 1.4 JRE, you read the 1.4
JavaDocs, and not the 1.6 JavaDocs.
- Oliver