Finding specific information has never been easy. At JavaOne, I interviewed Clark Richey in a java.net Community Corner 2009 podcast titled "MarkMail's java.net Email Search".

In his presentation, Clark demonstrates a lot of capabilities that I think developers will find highly useful when we're searching for information. Think about searching through forums, or searching online using a search engine. It's a time consuming and tedious process. You know the information you need is out there somewhere, but how do you find it?

Java.net on MarkMail catalogues and analyzes emails posted on the java.net site, by members of the java.net communities and projects. As you might guess, a lot of these messages include discussion of programming problems, along with the solutions to those problems. In this sense, MarkMail turns the java.net community email postings into searchable forums.

I had experimented a little bit with the MarkMail search before, but not all that much. After hearing Clark's presentation, I plan to use it a lot more. MarkMail provides some pretty amazing search capabilities, including visualizations that enable you to hone in on specific information that has been posted in potentially multiple email lists. You can create "sets" where you in essence create your own "web site" containing email search results that are of interest to you, and possibly to others (you can share your sets with others). These sets also include capability to create a feed that you and your associates can subscribe to, so you'll receive new updates that match your set's search criteria as new matching emails are posted.

So, let's do an experiment. Say I'm working with GlassFish, and I'm running into some issues trying to configure it with OpenESB. I type

glassfish openesb

into the "java.net on MarkMail" search box and hit my "Enter" key. I'm brought to a MarkMail.org page that shows me a histogram that categorizes by date the more than 4300 email messages somehow related to GlassFish and OpenESB that have been posted on java.net mailing lists. There are also tables showing the email lists where the messages were published, names of people who wrote the messages (for example, Mark S White has sent more than 200 messages that fit the glassfish+openesb search criteria), types of messages, attachments... From this page, I can dig deeper, selecting messages by date, author, list, attachments, etc. If I use the attachments box, I can find messages with a certain type of attachment (for example, jpg images), and can actually look at most types of attachment without having download the files. For example, right now I'm looking at a screenshot that Bing Lu attached to a message he posted in the net.java.dev.open-esb.users mailing list last September.

If you're a developer and you haven't yet tried out the java.net MarkMail search, the next time you're searching for specific information, or if you just want to find out what's being talked about by certain people or in certain java.net communities, give it a try. On every java.net page that has the gray sidebar on the left, you'll find a "java.net on MarkMail" search box at the bottom of the sidebar.

Clark produced a movie (.mov format) that you can download, in addition to listening to the podcast. Do listen to the podcast if what I've described above interests you. java.net on MarkMail really is an incredibly powerful tool.