Marla Parker's Weblog

This year at JavaOne, Clark Richey met me in the java.net Community Corner to tell me about MarkMail, a free service for searching mailing list archives powered by MarkLogic Server, a product that they sell. I said sure, go for it, sounds interesting and the price is right. Clark handed the task off to Jason Hunter, and the first week in July, Jason wrote:

We just finished loading the java.net archives into MarkMail. You can now search (and analyze!) in a unified way the roughly one million emails gathered across the thousands of java.net lists over the years.

The traffic growth chart is really quite beautiful, trending up and to the right. You can see it here:

http://markmail.org/search/?q=list%3Anet.java

Just about half the java.net mails are auto-generated as a result of checkins or bugs. If we remove those, it's still beautiful as you can see below. People are writing more than 15,000 human-to-human emails every month on java.net!

Wow - that is cool, and you quickly get the feeling it is just the tip of the iceberg. He also included a link to show all the messages from sun.com, and various other cool things. We will create a page on java.net with a bunch of sample queries and instructions on how new active mailing lists on java.net can get added to the MarkMail archive.

Just as the java.net FishEye instance (for CVS and SVN separately) is provided for free by Atlassian and Contegix, now MarkMail for java.net is provided free by MarkLogic. If you figure out cool searches that a project or community on java.net might want to include on a home page, please let me know. (If you use del.icio.us, you can bookmark it for:marlacparker or for:java.net.)