Java Magazine - May/June 2012

Luckily, we are getting help. The London Java Community has done a great job of pushing along information about how to do builds and providing very constructive and timely feedback on these topics. And there’s a developer from SAP named Volker Simonis who has done a fantastic job at documenting his own experiences building OpenJDK on a number of platforms. There are lots of stars in the community, but we’re always looking for more!

Java Magazine: OpenJDK contributors now include such companies as Apple, and as you mentioned, IBM and Twitter. It’s noteworthy that Twitter joined, even though they are not a company that gets their revenue from software licensing—they’re an end user of Java. Smith: This is a very important point. When I was at Eclipse, we noticed something that academics and others have written about. There are different waves of participation in open source communities. The first wave is usually one or two organizations that have a significant code base that, for whatever reason, they’re interested in making open source. They are usually ISVs [independent software vendors], or other enterprise software companies, that make their revenues directly from software licensing.

Then, after the project has proven itself, a second wave of participation occurs, consisting of companies that are software companies but don’t generate their revenue directly from software licenses. So software to them is not their

COMMUNITY JAVA IN ACTION

Left to right: Oracle’s
Donald Smith,
director of product
management, and
Dalibor Topic, principal
product manager,
OpenJDK, make
plans for an OpenJDK
community event.
Smith and Cecilia Borg,
OpenJDK onboarding
program manager,
talk about recognizing
achievements in the
OpenJDK community.

Smith: The OpenJDK community has access— through a TCK license agreement specifically for the OpenJDK community—to a compatibility test kit to validate that their builds of OpenJDK are compatible with the Java SE specification. This license is free of charge, but you have to sign the agreement, and we have to process it, which can take a few weeks. You can find the agreement on the OpenJDK Website. We’re trying to keep Java compatible. Java Magazine: What’s happening now in terms of industry participation in the OpenJFX community? Smith: We announced at 2011 JavaOne that we were going to begin the process of open sourcing JavaFX, and we’ve made strides with initial code contributions, and now we’re looking to ramp up community participation. Several organizations are making strategic use of JavaFX, and we’re hoping to see more participation in the project. We anticipate having some exciting announcements related to JavaFX at JavaOne this year. Java Magazine: Tell us about the various groups who are a part of OpenJDK.

Smith: The notion of a group is codified in the OpenJDK bylaws. A group is a collection of participants interested in engaging in an open conversation about a common interest. There are, for example, groups that focus on the core libraries, the compiler, and security. One of the more topical areas right now that my team is focusing on is the quality group, where we want to make it easier for people to submit and run their own test cases and test harnesses. There is a group related to build. The challenge with both of these groups, and a number of our activities, is that we are trying to push the infrastructure along to keep up with the demands of the community. We’re working on a better bug reporting system, but we also need a better build and test story so that people can more easily get their own builds up and running.