There’s a new thread at Advogato suggesting a database containing links to all the world’s Javadoc. I think this is a brilliant idea, and it has the added value of being completely implementable, because of the Java’s clever way of avoiding namespace collisions in package names. Bad citizens can create namespace collisions, but the system does a pretty good job of discouraging it. Project maintainers could specify which packages they supply Javadoc for and the site could just match up search terms entered by users with those package names. Even better, all the project maintainers would have to do is point the site at the URL where the Javadoc is stored and it could yank down the Javadoc and build an index of the packages and classes documented on the site. I’m really loving this idea.