OpenJDK and Zulu compatibility in preparation of Oracle new commercial use policy

Support
#1

Apart from the new Java SE release cadence, what bothers me (and the majority of Java adopters out there) is the new commercial policy adopted by Oracle for the public releases of its JDK builds.

It is clear that Oracle is trying a new monetization strategy, by stopping public updates of JDK versions (even LTS releases) for commercial users. Commercial users are now forced to buy a subscription service from Oracle, to continue receiving critical security and bug fixes.

Given that I never trusted Oracle in the past, and I’ll never do in the future, I’d like to switch all of my JDK installs to OpenJDK, and Zulu (Open Source, Fully Supported OpenJDK | Azul Platform Core) seems a wise choice, made by thousands of other companies. The fact that I can start for free, and then acquire an Enterprise license, can reassure both me and my clients. They also offer a compatibility kit that one can install for free, if your software makes use of Oracle Hotspot specific features (Commercial Compatibility Kit - Azul | Better Java Performance, Superior Java Support)

Now the real question is:
Are both the framework and Studio tested and certified to run smoothly on the OpenJDK (and particularly on Zulu flavor of the JDK)?

I think from now on more and more users will try to switch to OpenJDK installs, so having an official test run by Haulmont, and published online, will help reassuring all those users…

What do you think?

Paolo

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#2

Hi Paolo,

We understand your concerns and agree that many users will prefer OpenJDK or Zulu over Oracle JDK in the future. We are going to provide full compatibility with these builds of JDK and test as much as possible.

In fact, unit and integration tests located in cuba repository already run on OpenJDK 8, see Travis config. These are not the full test suite, we have more integration tests in the special aggregator app, as well as UI and various functional and cluster tests, running on the internal infrastructure. Now they use only Oracle JDK, but since version 7.0 which will support Java 9+, we are going to run them on all major JDK builds.

1 Like