demise of sun.com

Roedy Green · Sep 15, 2012

Oracle has dropped dozens of links on sun.com without providing
redirects to oracle.com. I am doing my best to find replacements, but
I suspect a fair bit of material is going to disappear.

Roedy Green · Sep 15, 2012

Oracle has dropped dozens of links on sun.com without providing
redirects to oracle.com. I am doing my best to find replacements, but
I suspect a fair bit of material is going to disappear.

Mark · Sep 17, 2012

all these links now just go to a generic Java page:
-snip-

It is a common thing for a webmaster to reorganise a website. The
catch is the links into that website then stop working. Ideally the
webmaster should set up permanent redirects from the old URL to the
new to inform everyone of where their old pages went and to keep the
old links working. However, companies such as Oracle do not do this.
They prefer to force the hundreds of websites that link into them to
individually research the links with Google to find the new ones or
delete them. Obviously the total amount of work is thousands of times
greater, but they don't care. It is not them doing the work, it is the
companies who send them business. Mindless next-quarter capitalism
demands this sort of behaviour.

This is particularly annoying when you search for a problem and find a
'solution' in a forum, which is just a link to a now nonexistent web
page.

John B. Matthews · Sep 17, 2012

Mark said:
This is particularly annoying when you search for a problem and find
a 'solution' in a forum, which is just a link to a now nonexistent
web page.

And how! As a concrete example, I frequently cite _A Swing Architecture
Overview_ formerly here:

<http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/architecture/>

Now here:

<http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/architecture-142923.html>

Note how the (now missing) embedded images still refer to the old site.

They (eventually) normalized the API documentation into a convenient
scheme:

<http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/index.html>
<http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/index.html>
Etc.

I can only hope for the best, while preparing for the worst.

Daniel Pitts · Sep 17, 2012

And how! As a concrete example, I frequently cite _A Swing Architecture
Overview_ formerly here:

<http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/architecture/>

Now here:

<http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/architecture-142923.html>

Note how the (now missing) embedded images still refer to the old site.

They (eventually) normalized the API documentation into a convenient
scheme:

<http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/index.html>
<http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/index.html>
Etc.

I really wish they had normalized it to
/javase/latest/docs/api/index.html, with
/javase/archive/6/docs/api/index.html for the "older" versions. Google
still links to 1.4 in some cases, and rarely to 7 specifically.

Arne VajhÃ¸j · Sep 17, 2012

I really wish they had normalized it to
/javase/latest/docs/api/index.html, with
/javase/archive/6/docs/api/index.html for the "older" versions. Google
still links to 1.4 in some cases, and rarely to 7 specifically.

It often helps to specify the Java version in the Google search.

java 7 java.util.scanner

instead of:

java.util.scanner

Arne

Roedy Green · Sep 18, 2012

all these links now just go to a generic Java page:

This is quite tedious work finding where these links went. In most
cases the original essay has been dropped. I have had to find other
materials to replace it.

There is a similar problem with RFCs. Old ones don't have a link to
the new replacement.

The author of a deleted document could most easily set up a forward
link faster than even one user could research it.

Lew · Sep 18, 2012

Martin said:
...but there's a known solution for RFCs - the RFC search engine
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcsearch.html

This takes an RFC number or a word/phrase in the RFC title and digs out
the referenced RFC plus a chain linked forward and backward to show all
the RFCs your taget obsoleted as well as those that make it obsolete.

Martin disproves this.

Google disproves this.

Sure, but using the search engine is easier for both author and
researchers.

... I now return you to the scheduled program.

Good search tools simulate intelligence better than cognitive
algorithms do, under many circumstances.

http://xkcd.com/903/

Suppose you write seventeen articles a year online, "you" being
any arbitrary entity such as you personally, a committee, a reporting
system or whatnot. Say the articles have a half-life of interval until
a link needs updating, along the lines that sun.com and RFC articles do.

You would need to review your own documents over years to keep them
up to date. This is what Oracle has done. Given finite resources,
there is a limit to how many articles you can update per year, and
still maintain your output of new articles. It stands to reason that
some articles will not be updated at any given time.

Regardless of the actual numbers, it's clear that link maintenance
will require increasing energy over time, as the mass of articles grows.

Consider instead a search solution along the lines Martin mentioned
for RFCs. Links can still be maintained, according to a triage system
of need and benefit. But they need not be, given a search system that
elicits the same connections on demand.

The search system complexity and deficiencies are completely independent
of the article base, and presumably bounded. Instead of an increasing
energy investment in link maintenance, lacking opportunity for innovation,
you have steady energy investment in search enhancement, with ample
opportunity for innovation and increased value.

Stanimir Stamenkov · Sep 18, 2012

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 04:27:39 -0700, /Roedy Green/:

There is a similar problem with RFCs. Old ones don't have a link to
the new replacement.

There's a nifty tool at ietf.org which allows viewing RFC documents
using HTML markup:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/

The HTML version adds a header with 'Obsoleted by' and 'Updated by'
links (and other useful information), for example:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822

In my Mozilla browser I've setup a keyword bookmark [1] like:

Location: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc%s
Keyword: rfc

Therefore typing "rfc 822" (or select/copy, or drag-n-drop) into the
"Address" field of the browser opens the corresponding RFC document
HTML version very conveniently for me.

[1]
<http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar>,
<http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_keyword_searches>,
<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Bookmark_Keywords>,
<http://www-archive.mozilla.org/docs/end-user/keywords.html>

Gunter Herrmann · Sep 19, 2012

Hi!

Instead of an increasing
energy investment in link maintenance, lacking opportunity for innovation,
you have steady energy investment in search enhancement, with ample
opportunity for innovation and increased value.

They could use a database such as DB2 (or even Oracle) ;-) to maintain all
links in their pages (including the history). So if you want to move,
remove or replace a document you will see all links that need to be updated.

Additionally you could provide a search form to find replacement links for
broken links (from the history).

An initial scan would process all pages and search for external and internal
links and populate some tables from that.

Regards

Gunter in Orlando, Fl

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demise of sun.com

Roedy Green

Roedy Green

Mark

John B. Matthews

Daniel Pitts

Arne VajhÃ¸j

Roedy Green

Lew

Stanimir Stamenkov

Gunter Herrmann

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