For a few reasons, I had to take a job maintaining/enhancing some huge government Java applications (largely Oracle based). I thought that there was some intere

For a few reasons, I had to take a job maintaining/enhancing some huge government Java applications (largely Oracle based). I thought that there was some interesting things going on in the ecosystem because of what I read about all of the JVM-based hacking. I thought that because all of this hacking there would be a lot of solid, well integrated tools and good documentation. I had successfully avoided Java for most of my career, so it was also an opportunity to learn something new. That was a terrible mistake. It's almost impossible to find answers that are relevant. There is very little readable documentation, even directly from Oracle. When you do find a relevant bit of information on a forum or blog, it's either outdated or useless because the author doesn't specify what their environment is. I asked my colleagues for books, blogs or other resources to help me get up to speed. They pretty much laughed and said I'm out of luck. I won't complain about the tooling. It's bad, but that may be more a matter of taste than anything else.