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Nicolas Fränkel
Nicolas Fränkel

Posted on • Originally published at blog.frankel.ch

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Most commonly available JDKs

For reasons I dare not mention, I had to install version 7 of the JDK a couple of months ago. As a Mac user, my usual way of installing is using Homebrew. To install a JDK, this is as easy as brew cask install adoptopenjdkx, where x is the Java version. It didn't work, as AdoptOpenJDK provides no version 7.

It took me some time to find a JDK 7. In the end, I found one in Zulu - thanks to Azul. Coupled to the fact that I also learned Alibaba provided a JDK and I got curious: how many JDK providers are out there? The next question is: which JDK can I use?

The matter can be confusing as a whole bunch of different JDKs is available. The OpenJDK project plays a big role in this ecosystem. Different developers jointly work on the OpenJDK codebase. They can be employees of software companies, including Oracle, Google, IBM, and Red Hat as part of their regular job. One can also work as an individual contributor to the codebase.

Vendors use OpenJDK as an upstream repository: individual vendors add additional features. The following diagram by Aleksey Shipilëv sums it up:

OpenJDK update releases

Without further ado, here are some of the most widespread JDK providers:

JDK Provider Available versions Miscellaneous
Oracle JDK Oracle Builds for different Java projects under development:
Adoptium Eclipse
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
Dragonwell Alibaba According to their own words:
Optimized for online e-commerce, financial, logistics applications running on 100,000+ servers
  • Supports Linux/x86_64 platform only
Corretto Amazon
Zulu Azul
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16-ea
Liberica BellSoft
Red Hat build of OpenJDK
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
Sap Machine SAP
  • 11
  • 15
  • 16-ea
Features contributed by SAP

To go further:

Originally published at A Java Geek on November 22th 2020

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Top comments (0)

Great read:

Is it Time to go Back to the Monolith?

History repeats itself. Everything old is new again and I’ve been around long enough to see ideas discarded, rediscovered and return triumphantly to overtake the fad. In recent years SQL has made a tremendous comeback from the dead. We love relational databases all over again. I think the Monolith will have its space odyssey moment again. Microservices and serverless are trends pushed by the cloud vendors, designed to sell us more cloud computing resources.

Microservices make very little sense financially for most use cases. Yes, they can ramp down. But when they scale up, they pay the costs in dividends. The increased observability costs alone line the pockets of the “big cloud” vendors.

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