I suggest a solution in the middle of both of your arguments. I agree with @anserran about that maintaining large javadoc it is not so useful, but I agree with @jtorrente that you need to document the thing. In fact, the need of the javadoc may suggest that the logic it is complicated. A solution in the middle will be to split the logic in different private methods with a proper name and use them here. This way, it is not needed to have a long javadoc but when you review / read the code the method name declares the intention of the programmer.