no! you idiots at Oracle

[Roedy Green]

Oracle is "reforming" the Sun website.

Changes look like typically this:

from:
http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/?frontpage-javaplatform

to:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index-jsp-141438.html

The important thing is there is NO pattern to this. Every one of
thousands of links out there in the world to the Sun site will
eventually have to be manually updated. ARRGGH!

I do some of my links manually and but most are computer-generated
from patterns. These nincompoops have destroyed all sense of order and
made all the links unmemorisable.

It is one thing to create an incompetent system, but quite another to
break a reasonable system to make it deliberately incompetent.

I guess I will have to automate the process by at least mechanically
preparing a CSV file of old and new URLS for individual links, and
writing a global search/replace. But I am not the only one with a
website with many Sun links.

It will all go pear-shaped over time.

On top of that, response time is WORSE. What the Bleep? There are now
more servers. Response should be better.

 

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Oracle is "reforming" the Sun website.

Changes look like typically this:

from:
http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/?frontpage-javaplatform

to:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index-jsp-141438.html

The important thing is there is NO pattern to this. Every one of
thousands of links out there in the world to the Sun site will
eventually have to be manually updated. ARRGGH!

I do some of my links manually and but most are computer-generated
from patterns. These nincompoops have destroyed all sense of order and
made all the links unmemorisable.

It is one thing to create an incompetent system, but quite another to
break a reasonable system to make it deliberately incompetent.

I guess I will have to automate the process by at least mechanically
preparing a CSV file of old and new URLS for individual links, and
writing a global search/replace. But I am not the only one with a
website with many Sun links.

It will all go pear-shaped over time.

On top of that, response time is WORSE. What the Bleep? There are now
more servers. Response should be better.

It's great when Java documentation references an important URL and it's
404-acled. Couldn't Oracle have maintained a URL translation table.
Surely it could be stored in, I dunno, a database?

 

[Robert Klemme]

It's great when Java documentation references an important URL and it's
404-acled. Couldn't Oracle have maintained a URL translation table.
Surely it could be stored in, I dunno, a database?

A nice example of what happens if an API is not kept stable across
versions...

Cheers

robert

 

[markspace]

Oracle is "reforming" the Sun website.

Changes look like typically this:

from:
http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/?frontpage-javaplatform

For each link you have like the one above, fetch the contents and check
sum (MD5?) it. Then spider the Oracle site for links you don't have,
and checksum each result fetched. Keep the old URL with the checksum in
a database.

to:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index-jsp-141438.html

Then for each check sum that matches, you probably have a match. Either
compare the contents directly, or maybe a close comparison (ignore
whitespace, or something like that, if necessary).

Now you have a database of old and new links. Not only can you update
your own site, you can provide a service for others to look-up old Sun
links and provide them with the new correct Oracle link. Maybe even
Oracle would be interested.

 

[Roedy Green]

It's great when Java documentation references an important URL and it's
404-acled. Couldn't Oracle have maintained a URL translation table.
Surely it could be stored in, I dunno, a database?

They must have one internally, since for a while the old URLs will
work. If they published it, perhaps with a tool, then people could
update their websites automatically, at least for the non-generated
URLs.

I suppose I am unusual in the number of references I have. What other
sites have lots of references? Perhaps we could combine forces to
save us all some work.

 

[ClassCastException]

For each link you have like the one above, fetch the contents and check
sum (MD5?) it. Then spider the Oracle site for links you don't have,
and checksum each result fetched. Keep the old URL with the checksum in
a database.




Then for each check sum that matches, you probably have a match. Either
compare the contents directly, or maybe a close comparison (ignore
whitespace, or something like that, if necessary).

That's not gonna work if they've rebranded all the pages with Oracle in
place of Sun, Oracle navbars at top/left instead of Sun's, etc.

Just the replacement of all the internal link URLs will suffice.

So you have to do a Bayesian match based on word frequencies instead.

 

[ClassCastException]

They must have one internally, since for a while the old URLs will work.
If they published it, perhaps with a tool, then people could update
their websites automatically, at least for the non-generated URLs.

If the Sun URLs in question all still worked, and were 300-series
redirects, then it'd be easy to write a tool to find all the old Sun
links in a corpus of HTML and snap them directly to the new URLs.

Unfortunately, as of right now java.sun.com seems to time out rather than
connect at all.

 

[markspace]

That's not gonna work if they've rebranded all the pages with Oracle in
place of Sun, Oracle navbars at top/left instead of Sun's, etc.

Just the replacement of all the internal link URLs will suffice.

So you have to do a Bayesian match based on word frequencies instead.

The two pages appear to be identical, including the targets for anchors.
I didn't actually do a diff.

 

[Roedy Green]

The important thing is there is NO pattern to this. Every one of
thousands of links out there in the world to the Sun site will
eventually have to be manually updated. ARRGGH!

A bit of both good and bad news. Oracle has simplified its new URLs a
bit.

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17409_01/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/quant.html

becomes

http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/quant.html

The old ones no longer work.

 

[Roedy Green]

The important thing is there is NO pattern to this. Every one of
thousands of links out there in the world to the Sun site will
eventually have to be manually updated. ARRGGH!

I have discovered another distressing thing about the Sun->Oracle
website transition. Oracle's temporary redirects don't necessarily
take you to the specific page. They often just take to you a generic
menu page. All the links have to be researched afresh. Spidering is
more difficult than one might think, because of varying dynamic
content, and sheer size of the Oracle/Sun websites. Further, it would
only work properly if Oracle's temporary redirects were correct, so
there is no point in spidering the entire Oracle website, just your
own.

What were these people thinking? I think they totally forgot that
there are extensive links to the Sun site out there. On my website
alone there are 2465 links.

 

[BGB]

I have discovered another distressing thing about the Sun->Oracle
website transition. Oracle's temporary redirects don't necessarily
take you to the specific page. They often just take to you a generic
menu page. All the links have to be researched afresh. Spidering is
more difficult than one might think, because of varying dynamic
content, and sheer size of the Oracle/Sun websites. Further, it would
only work properly if Oracle's temporary redirects were correct, so
there is no point in spidering the entire Oracle website, just your
own.

What were these people thinking? I think they totally forgot that
there are extensive links to the Sun site out there. On my website
alone there are 2465 links.

depending on others' URLs is inherently unsafe anyways...

but, yes, it is annoying some, as it makes looking for info related to
my own VM effort more difficult.

 

[ClassCastException]

The two pages appear to be identical, including the targets for anchors.
I didn't actually do a diff.

I meant site-internal links, not page-internal links. I doubt they'll all
tend to be relative URLs with the relative directory structure unchanged.
Not to mention changing the navbars, or even just changing an <img
src=sunlogo.jpg> to <img src=oraclelogo.jpg> somewhere near the top of
the page, will change the hash of a page dramatically.

 

[The Frog]

FWIW this seemingly moronic approach to handling technology that
Oracle is displaying here with the rebranding process seems typical of
their entire philosophy IMO. I have only ever seen one other group
take something that should be actually quite simple and screw it
systematically so badly - oh wait, thats Oracle again.....

The Frog

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

I have discovered another distressing thing about the Sun->Oracle
website transition. Oracle's temporary redirects don't necessarily
take you to the specific page. They often just take to you a generic
menu page. All the links have to be researched afresh. Spidering is
more difficult than one might think, because of varying dynamic
content, and sheer size of the Oracle/Sun websites. Further, it would
only work properly if Oracle's temporary redirects were correct, so
there is no point in spidering the entire Oracle website, just your
own.

What were these people thinking? I think they totally forgot that
there are extensive links to the Sun site out there. On my website
alone there are 2465 links.

Maybe it's time for a URL subscription protocol. Without speculating on the
fine details, rather than put an essentially dumb link in one of your own
pages, you embed a smart link which is a subscription to a URL service. The
service can either provide a constantly updated "hard" version of the
correct URL, or service providers can undertake to proxy you when you click
on the link and go to _them_...your choice when you configure. Like I say
I'm doing a bit of handwaving here, at this stage. Web pages that are
interested in playing nice as sources also register with URL subscription
services, so that they can provide notifications of changes such as what
just now disrupted you.

Just a thought. There may even be stuff like that out there, but I've never
heard of any.

AHS

 

[Tony Proctor]

Oracle is "reforming" the Sun website.

Changes look like typically this:

from:
http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/?frontpage-javaplatform

to:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index-jsp-141438.html

The important thing is there is NO pattern to this. Every one of
thousands of links out there in the world to the Sun site will
eventually have to be manually updated. ARRGGH!

I do some of my links manually and but most are computer-generated
from patterns. These nincompoops have destroyed all sense of order and
made all the links unmemorisable.

It is one thing to create an incompetent system, but quite another to
break a reasonable system to make it deliberately incompetent.

I guess I will have to automate the process by at least mechanically
preparing a CSV file of old and new URLS for individual links, and
writing a global search/replace. But I am not the only one with a
website with many Sun links.

It will all go pear-shaped over time.

On top of that, response time is WORSE. What the Bleep? There are now
more servers. Response should be better.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

Finding a bug is a sign you were asleep a the switch when coding. Stop
debugging, and go back over your code line by line.

This type of re-branding is surprisingly naive by Oracle! They would be
better off giving Java it's own "brand" (possibly even resurrecting
something like javasoft) so that all this Web collateral can remain constant
in the future.

As it is, if Oracle gets hard-up and needs to flog Java to someone else,
this tight branding will reduce the value because any enlightened company
will know how much of a PITA undoing-it or changing-it will be

Tony Proctor

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

This type of re-branding is surprisingly naive by Oracle! They would be
better off giving Java it's own "brand" (possibly even resurrecting
something like javasoft) so that all this Web collateral can remain constant
in the future.

As it is, if Oracle gets hard-up and needs to flog Java to someone else,
this tight branding will reduce the value because any enlightened company
will know how much of a PITA undoing-it or changing-it will be

    Tony Proctor

I'm disheartened about all this. Frankly, Java (as a concept and
anthropomorphised) has taken it on the chin for a little too long
now. As soon as I learned of the sun purchase, I knew that the Not-
Invented-Here mongers were going to take over and @#$% up quite a
bit. I'm finally caving in and viewing Java as unstoppably headed for
footnote status.

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

There is no reason they couldn't have kept java.com, java.net and java.sun.com.

They want maximum benefits for the Oracle "brand".

And since they paid a lot of money for SUN, then it seems
fair to me.

Arne

 

[Lew]

They want maximum benefits for the Oracle "brand".

And since they paid a lot of money for SUN, then it seems
fair to me.

Oh, no, Arne - we may only come to bury Oracle, not to praise them. We cannot
go around saying things that give them a fair shake! Gods forfend! We must
perpetrate the Oracle-hating idiocy.

I don't suppose anyone thinks of taking some action to keep Java viable, like,
oh, writing for the open source version or something. It so much easier to
sit on the sidelines and opine about how Oracle is "ruining" Java.

What did Thomas G. Marshall say upthread? Oh, yes, "I'm finally caving in and
viewing Java as unstoppably headed for footnote status."

What an incredibly useful and forward-thinking attitude! Not.

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

Oh, no, Arne - we may only come to bury Oracle, not to praise them.  We cannot
go around saying things that give them a fair shake!  Gods forfend!  We must
perpetrate the Oracle-hating idiocy.

I don't suppose anyone thinks of taking some action to keep Java viable, like,
oh, writing for the open source version or something.  It so much easier to
sit on the sidelines and opine about how Oracle is "ruining" Java.

What did Thomas G. Marshall say upthread?  Oh, yes, "I'm finally caving in and
viewing Java as unstoppably headed for footnote status."

What an incredibly useful and forward-thinking attitude!  Not.

Didn't mean it to be useful, nor should I have to. Didn't mean for it
to be forward thinking, nor should it be. Misplaced or not, argue
away, but it's just a lament. I suppose you've never expressed a
lament before?

 

[Joshua Cranmer]

There is no reason they couldn't have kept java.com, java.net and java.sun.com.

From what I have heard, it seems that Oracle bought Sun solely for
Java, presumably to capitalize in on its success. In order to best
capitalize on it, they want you to always think of Oracle when you use
Java, so rebranding everything works to their favor.