I came across this and am curious if it affects lucee’s future and if so whats the impact?
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We’ll look to move to:
https://openjdk.java.net/
For example, the official Dockerfile relies on the official Tomcat image that relies on the official OpenJDK image.
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All of the development of the JDK is done in OpenJDK. Many of the OpenJDK committers are Oracle employees, but their code is pushed to the OpenJDK project. Oracle then packages it and adds some proprietary tools to some versions.
The main problem is that Oracle will stop providing any patches to the OpenJDK six months after each release is made. That is a major issue since many of the bugs are discovered more than 6 months after a release is published, due to late adoption.
Fortunately, there are some other options. Last night Gil Tene of Azul Systems was the guest speaker at the LA JUG Meetup. Gil is the CTO/co-founder of Azul Systems, is an OpenJDK committer, and is on the JCP committee. He was telling us about Azul’s line of products and support, and I asked him about this very topic.
Azul Zulu Community Edition is free to use and it offers Medium Term and Long Term Support, both extend far beyond the 6 months that Oracle will allot.
They also offer other products and support, e.g. Zulu Enterprise which offers extended support, and Azul Zing, which has a specialized garbage collector and can handle huge JVMs - up to 8TB heap size!
I plan to download Zulu Community Edition in the next few days and check it out.
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Adobe still don’t have much to say on the subject… maybe something will come out of the CF Summit?
We understand that there is quite a bit of apprehension associated with this. We request you to kindly bear with us till we have an update for you.
https://coldfusion.adobe.com/2018/10/oracles-java-policy-change/
I’ve been looking at it closely too since I’m starting to invest in writing Java in the future. The main risk is people being ignorant and downloading java from oracle.com by accident. It might be worth educating Lucee people during install and download about this since a non-Java developer is probably not going to instantly understand and the consequences are substantial since oracle version is certainly a big purchase especially if you run it on multiple production systems.
I’m really excited about the features in Java 9,10,11, especially in terms of writing Java code, but it can make a huge difference for Lucee. So what does it mean for Lucee when Java improves and releases more free features in the future? It means we can make Lucee amazing and be inspired to innovate again.
They are going to do awesome things to match up with other languages like Google Go and C# too. I especially look forward to “fibers” for cheaper threads and “value types” for faster more “functional” programming. Very cool stuff.
Also today, Java is already more efficient then some parts of Lucee, so we can upgrade to that, and benefit. For example, some of the JDK library has been improved. And I don’t know if this would be interesting, but if you wanted to use jlink and the ahead of time compiler when lucee installs, you could make it restart faster and be substantially small package. All features that came later after Lucee was already made.
There are probably a 100 ways that Java is getting better. I’ve been having fun learning about this stuff.
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Sure the new features in 9/10/11 are nice, but the license change is still not good for us.
Oracle just want the money, like you can see what the did with google/android and so many other projects.
I dont see any advantage for us.
Its just makes using Java more complicated (for users and devs), because they must care about licenses.
For me personnaly, java gets in the wrong direction with it.
There are too many alternativs for Java in every section, which are also free (nodeJS, Php, C#, .net-Core, Electron…).
And if you look to Android, they want to bring kotlin in foreground and are using openjdk.
Android is not even full java-8 compatible and will not receive java 9/10/11 features so soon(if at all).
For me another question is:
What happens, when we are still using the newst Oracle JDK (because at the moment, its mostly free, they just charge for some modules right?) and Oracle stops contribution on OpenJDK. And if we would go on with Oracle JDK and later they change the license, so we must charge money for the Oracle JDK. We would not be able to got back, because OpenJDK becomes too much behind the Oracle JDK.
On this topic, Charlie Carehart did a great blog post today on the topic:
I’ve also started this page in the CommandBox docs to help track what non-oracle JREs there are, how well they work, and how to install them. Even though this page is a for CommandBox, the same basic info applies to people just wanting to use them for servers too.
Regarding what Adobe will do, I spoke with the engineers at CFSummit and the CF team has no say in the matter. Adobe corporate is looking for a suitable replacement for Oracle and will announce it at the end of this year along with updates for CF11 CF2016, and CF2018 to support this new Java provider. At least that was the plan, but of course there have been no official announcements from Adobe on the matter other than one in the community portal simply acknowledging they were aware of the Oracle changes and would update us soon.
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I’ve just spun off another thread here in Discourse from an internal discussion that compares the features, pricing, and support of all the major players in Java right now. I’m hoping it will guide Lucee in which Java distros to bundle as well as people just looking for a good java install for their own servers.
https://lucee.daemonite.io/t/non-oracle-jdks-overview-of-options/4846