One of the pearls presented by Renzo Borgatti at this year’s ClojuTRE was the little-known javadoc function.

I keep a local copy of the Java 8 SDK apidocs on my machine, which come in useful when you’re coding close to the host platform. (For example, right now I’m coding with java.nio.ByteBuffer and find I need quick access to the docs. Until now I’ve been opening up the apidocs manually and searching for what I need by scrolling through the index of the gazillion or so Java type names that form part of the JDK.)

For what it’s worth, I installed the Java 8 apidocs with pacman.

sudo pacman -Sy openjdk8-doc

Now I can add the following to my ~/.lein/profiles.clj :-

{:user
  {:repl-options
    {:init
      (do
        (require '[clojure.java.javadoc :refer [javadoc]])
        (clojure.java.javadoc/add-local-javadoc
          "/usr/share/doc/java8-openjdk/api/"))}
  }
}

Now, any time I launch a REPL, I can do the following

(javadoc java.lang.String)

and up pops a browser with the javadoc. Thanks Renzo!

The advantage of using ~/.lein/profiles.clj rather than project.clj is that it doesn’t affect other users of the project, who may be using other operating systems or distros.

Working with other namespaces

For most of my projects, the first thing I do when launching the JVM is switch to a dev namespace. This means that if there are any compilation issues with dev, I can fix them with a working REPL.

However, what becomes of our javadoc function? It is no longer present. Therefore I’ve added the following to the dev namespaces of my projects.

(ns dev
  (:require
    [clojure.java.javadoc :refer [javadoc]]
  …
))

Fortunately, the local javadoc location persists I don’t have to set it again. This means that I can set it once, with clojure.java.javadoc/add-local-javadoc, in my local Leiningen profiles.clj, and it will set things up for me without affecting those working in other operating systems and distros.