Getting Help

When working with any technology, you will invariably run into technical difficulties. This can be frustrating, so any assistance you can get to help with troubleshooting the problem is welcome. Here are a couple of suggestions on where to get help for the technologies we covered.

Online Discussion Forums

The Spring Framework discussions forums (forum.springframework.org) have come in handy for me personally when I was stuck on a problem and needed help. In fact, the core Spring developers frequently answer questions in these forums. I have even had Rod Johnson (founder of Spring) answer my questions personally!

The Hibernate discussion forums (forum.hibernate.org) have been equally helpful, although from time to time, I have found that you get terse responses from the founders of Hibernate. (I wish this wasn't the case, but it is.) Nevertheless, there are plenty of other Hibernate users willing to help.

Also, Eclipse had public newsgroups accessible via the eclipse.org website.

Javadoc and Source Code

Although both Spring and Hibernate have good reference manuals, there are times when you need information about these frameworks. As I stressed at the end of the previous chapter, adding Javadoc is very important because the code is one of the artifacts that lasts and is always current, considering that is what the users are typically working with. The Spring Framework and Hibernate seem to follow this logic, hence you will find lots of documentation in their Javadocsmore than you might expect. If you cannot locate the information in the reference documentation, there is a good chance you will find it in the Javadocs for these APIs.

One additional source of documentation, although not an optimal one, is to browse through the source of open source technologies such as Spring and Hibernate. Most open source technologies either bundle the source with their distribution or provide a separate download for it. This can also come in handy with tools such as Eclipse, which allows you to attach to a source code folder when you are debugging through your code. Debugging isn't the only reason you might want to attach to their source code in Eclipse; at times, you might want to browse the source code behind these APIs to understand how they work behind the scenes.