Azul Zulu

General Discussions
#1

I’m surprised that this doesn’t get talked about a little more often:
Azul Zulu

It’s a fully functional, supported, open-sourced OpenJDK8 implementation. I’ve just been testing it here on Windows and it appears to be virtually the same as Oracle Java, except that it doesn’t have JavaFX included - but the binaries from Oracle drop straight in and it just works.

Being open sourced there’s nothing stopping you from hacking out the bits you don’t want, either.

Cas :slight_smile:

#2

Interesting indeed, but what are the pros (for us)?

This depends on the license. :point:

#3

There are very few sites that provide builds of OpenJDK, and its a pain to try to build the whole thing yourself, Azul does it for all 3 of the big platforms (Win, Linux & Mac). The Oracle builds of JRE/JDK are under the BCL licence which don’t allow you to modify or strip out bits you don’t need as you can only distribute it “complete and unmodified”. e.g. Those distributing the Oracle builds of the JRE’s using tools like Packr are actually breaching the license, the Azul builds would allow you to avoid such a breach.

The license is GPL2 with the Classpath exception.

#4

Hi

I have packaged my game with OpenJDK for several months (or years?), I prefer using Alex Kashchenko’s builds than those of Azul Systems because OpenJDK 7 is currently enough for me and I can use his build scripts to compile OpenJDK by myself. I like getting rid of the crapwares put into Oracle Java. OpenJDK 9 includes OpenJFX (then there is no need to make some JAR/ZIP/DLL/SO/JNILIB surgery to include JavaFX). I confirm that several PackR’s users insist on using Oracle Java with the JRE minimizer which infringes the Oracle BCL.

If you need a JRE supporting ARM under Linux, I advise you to have a look at the DEB packages of Debian. Of course, it’s not interesting for those who use some APIs that don’t support it…

#5

And more interestingly, Azul are apparently putting the finishing touches to an ARMv7 architecture build :slight_smile: Which I think means… Raspberry Pi Model B a-go-go! Finally some proper Java performance without having to resort to Oracle licensing and redistribution bullshit.

Cas :slight_smile:

#6

This is a good news.
Since this week the Oracle IT security executive announced that Oracle’s primary concern is protecting its intellectual property, not security.