Java Magazine - May/June 2012

COMMUNITY

OpenJDK

Get Collaborative

Oracle’s Donald Smith discusses the OpenJDK community, the place to collaborate on Java SE. BY JANICE J. HEISS

JAVA IN ACTION

Donald Smith has spent more than a decade serv- ing the Java community. After working as an engineer, consultant, and product manager for several information technology companies, he joined Oracle in 2002, where he served until 2005 as director of technology evangelism. He next moved to the nonprofit Eclipse Foundation, where he was director of ecosystem development from 2006 to 2011. Smith currently works for Oracle Canada ULC on the product management team for Java SE, where he is primarily responsible for the OpenJDK community.

When he returned to Oracle in May of 2011, Smith remarked in his blog about his new job, “The team I’m on has one simple mandate—keep Java the number one computing platform in the world.”

Java Magazine: What is OpenJDK?

Smith: Basically, OpenJDK is the place to collaborate on an open source implementation of Java SE and related projects. It’s distinct from some of the other open source Java communities, some of which are hosted at Oracle and some of which are hosted elsewhere. So, for example, the GlassFish community is a place to collaborate on Java EE. Eclipse is a place to collaborate on Java tools and runtimes at the Eclipse Foundation. The NetBeans community is a place to collaborate on Java tools at Oracle, and so on. There are lots of different communities in the Java ecosystem, and OpenJDK is the one for doing Java SE work. Java Magazine: Give us some perspective on the history of OpenJDK, which goes back to 2006 when Sun initially open sourced Java. Smith: It was first announced in November 2006, and in 2007 the actual project was created, so people could access the code. From 2007 to 2009, a lot of formation took place as more committers joined. And then, in 2009, Oracle began the process of acquiring Sun, which officially closed in January 2010, and that gave Oracle a chance to reveal its commitment to OpenJDK and ongoing plans.