Openjdk

Looking to try out OpenJDK 9? If you didn’t know, OpenJDK 9 is going to be the reference implemtation for Java 9 (assuming the pattern for Java 7 and Java 8 continues). Pre-release packages for Fedora 23, 24, 25 and Rawhide as well as RHEL 7 are available on copr: https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/omajid/openjdk9/ Please note that these are not official Fedora (or RHEL) packages. Official Fedora packages will be proposed and added to Fedora closer to OpenJDK 9’s release. ...

I posted 3 patches today The first patch is for OpenJDK 9. It creates a hole that allows alternative plugin implementations to plug into (pardon the pun) OpenJDK and make use of existing plugin-specific classes in OpenJDK. The second and third patches are for IcedTea-Web. They allow IcedTea-Web to (progressively) build against OpenJDK8 and OpenJDK9. What does this mean? Soon we might actually be able to build and run IcedTea- Web against OpenJDK. Yes, an Open Source/Free Software plugin running on top of OpenJDK (without any custom patches). Of course, a lot of this is still up in the air. The OpenJDK folks might not accept the patch, though I am hopeful they will - it’s very small and conservative. ...

I have always been impressed by the effort OpenJDK folks go to maintain API compatibility. I recently came across a nifty little trick that is used in the OpenJDK codebase to help achieve this goal. Behold the SharedSecrets class! The name of the class is a little misleading since it doesn’t have anything to do with the cryptographic concepts of shared secrets. The javadocs do a (slightly) better job describing its purpose: ...