Hello,
First of all, apologies if this is in the wrong forum, and apologies if this has been asked before. I did search the archives and didn't find anything relevant.
I'm a PHP/Perl developer who is looking to branch out into
Java to develop web applications for the company I work for. I've been interested in/toying around with Java for a while, but I'm now ready to start using it for a real project. I've found in my time as a PHP guy that I've learned quite a bit by lurking in the PHP mailing lists. In fact, I'd say that probably a good third of my PHP knowledge was gleaned from the mailing lists discussions I've read over the past few years. That being the case I'm looking for a good Java oriented list or lists so I can pick up Java knowledge in a similar fashion.
I stumbled across the JavaRanch forums here and I think they are great. I can see specifically that the Java in General forums (both the beginner and the intermediate forums) will be very helpful to me as I start working with Java in earnest. However, I'm just not much of a web forum type person. I very much prefer mailing lists. This is just a personal preference, but I'm subscribed to dozens of mailing lists on other topics and I manage them all with an IMAP account and server-side filters that move everything into subfolders. I'm much more comfortable organizing and following discussions in my existing IMAP email client than I am running around to various web forums that are less flexible regarding following/ignoring threads, seeing what has been read and what is unread, etc. I understand that web forums have their own set of advantages over mailing lists, and many prefer them (in fact, it seems that in the Java world forums are more prevalent in general than mailing lists). But for me mailing lists are just easier.
To that end, can anyone here recommend a good active list or lists that focus on general Java development similar to the Java in General forums here? I just can't seem to find any using Google. I also perused a few mailing list archive sites like marc.theaimsgroup.com and gmane, but didn't see any general java mailing lists that had any activity to them. Am I just looking for something that doesn't exist?
Thanks in advance for any pointers...