Java Docs Search made easier

About a couple of years ago, as we were developing with J2EE and whole bunch of open source libraries (perhaps some 20 in number) one of the things I observed to be clumsy is locating Class names or method signatures while coding. At times you only remember a part of a class name or a method name. You end up having to go to the web to look for it. Each library's JavaDocs are in different places and it does waste you time.

There was a need for a tool to search across multiple JavaDocs. Upon Googling at that time, we found that there was a desktop based utility available (I don't recall it's name right now) to search Java Docs across multiple libraries or JDK versions. The beauty of it is that it takes the actual Java Docs files as it is and indexes them. The negative side of it is it needed to be installed in each developers PC and we had over 30 of them in the team.

I felt that it would be a good small project for someone to make the above as a web based application to save the deployment effort each time a library changes. When we were welcoming a couple of new colleagues, this project was a obvious choice for one of them when we needed him to get familiar with Struts.

Hence the "API Search" tool was born and used internally fairly regularly. From the beginning, I wanted this to be open sourced as a way of paying back to the community and also for collective improvement and maintenance of it. For one reason or the other (though not directly due to my previous employer as I did have the approval to contribute to FOSS wherever I see it fit) it wasn't done and I also left my previous employer last year.

My friend and ex-colleague Karthik attended the foss.in with me in last November. He was very much impressed by the FOSS approach there and went back with the renewed vigor and one of the first thing to come out of this fresh energy is releasing of APISearch as a open source tool under GPL license. I am going to join this project as a developer myself and contribute anything I can to this. I am certainly proud of Karthik for this.

Go check it out. Please give feedback there or comment in this blog and we will take this further.