Jude

Jude: The Ultimate Java Documentation Browser

Jude is an interactive Java documentation browser program. As the author of the bestselling book Java in a Nutshell, and the innovative (but now outdated and out of print) electronic quick-reference Java Power Reference, I've spent a lot of time thinking about Java documentation, and how it can be made easy to use. Jude is my answer; I consider it to be the ultimate Java documentation tool.

Jude has the following features:

It displays complete, definitive Java documentation, from doc-comments in Java source code, just like javadoc does.
It uses the successful, succinct, easy-to-use quick-ref format of Java in a Nutshell, instead of the bulky and hard-to-use format of javadoc.
It includes powerful searching features that allow you to very quickly jump to exactly the documentation you are looking for. You can search for by name for any package, type or member: it is usually much quicker to type the name of the class or method you are interested in instead of the click, scroll, click, scroll, click, scroll required by javadoc. Jude also creates a full-text index of javadoc documentation, so you can search for documentation by content in addition to searching by name.

Jude runs as a web server on your desktop machine (or, if you buy a site license, anywhere on your network). To use it, you simply connect to the server using Firefox or any Mozilla-based browser. (IE and Safari are not currently supported because of CSS compatibility issues.)

Jude is available in two feature levels. The standard version is targeted at developers who want to browse the documentation for the public APIs of libraries developed by others. Jude Pro is intended for developers who also want to browse the internal documentation of their in-house libraries: it allows developers to read documentation of private and package private types and members, and also the convenient ability to view the source code of any type or member.

If you're interested and want to know more, take a look at the user's guide and administrator's guide. (These documents is also included with the download bundle, so you can wait and read them later, if you want.)

Jude is commercial software, for sale at a price comparable to the cost of a good Java reference book. To try Jude out free for 30 days, follow the steps below:

If you like what you see during your evaluation, please buy a license.

Thanks for your interest in Jude!

-- David Flanagan