Adopt OpenJDK

Do you remember Java 7 being launched last year? This new major release of Java was awaited for a while, as Java 6 was released in 2006! And then, a major regression was discovered on Apache Lucene and Solr running Java 7, and was quickly fixed in Java 7 update 1.

What went wrong? You may argue Oracle was notified by Lucene and Solr folks about the bug before the release announcement, but remember Java 7 already had been delayed many times. The real issue is that the major open source projects only started testing the new platform a few days before the GA announcement, even though preview builds were available for a while from the OpenJDK project. We can't blame project contributors for the lateness in testing, as contributing to an open source project is pure time donation to the community and non-paying work, but we need a better strategy for Java 8, since it will introduce far more complex changes in the JVM and JDK.

The AdoptOpenJDK program is an initiative to get as many Java users as possible to try the OpenJDK8 preview builds, so that feedback is collected before JDK8 is officially released. There are many ways to contribute to this program (as explained on the wiki), but the most basic one is to start testing your own project on the Java 8 platform. CloudBeescan help you there, as we just made OpenJDK8 (preview) available on DEV@cloudso that you can configure a build job to check project compatibility. We will upgrade the JDKfor all recent preview builds until JDK8 is final.

With the many open source projects already hosted on DEV@cloud through our FOSS program and the free availability of build resources, we hope this will help the open source community improve JDK 8 quality as it moves toward release.

--Nicolas de Loof
​CloudBees