Canonical has some extra toppings, flavorings, and offers coming for its bigger Java fans – because the suits swallow a lot of the stuff.
A cluster of related announcements from the house of Ubuntu indicate it is taking Java – and supporting Java – seriously.
It’s introducing its own builds of OpenJDK and offering extended support for them via Ubuntu Pro. It’s offering new chiseled Ubuntu containers for three LTS versions of OpenJRE: 8, 17, and 21 (Chisel is Canonical’s FOSS tool for cutting down packages to their essentials). It’s also making it easier to get started developing apps using the Spring framework with a new pre-assembled “devpack” for Spring.
You don’t tend to see it around much anymore, but Java is very much alive, even thriving. It’s not that it’s not there, it’s just that you may not recognize it. It got middle-aged, lost its hair, put on a suit, and went to work in a big office block.
Java – getting older, ditching the red nose and cyberpunk accessories
It’s also not coincidental that, thanks to this very enterprise use, there’s gold in them thar JARs. Java is probably the main reason Oracle bought Sun 15 years ago, and some half a dozen years later, after everyone relaxed, Big Red figured out how to monetize it.
Once Oracle began charging for the JDK, that drove people to open source equivalents built from OpenJDK. One company trying to help with that was Spring developer Pivotal, which offered prebuilt OpenJDK binaries at a website called AdoptOpenJDK. That’s evolved into an Eclipse-based working group with the whimsical name of Adoptium. (Eclipse started out inside IBM, which is also an Adoptium backer. See what we meant about it going corporate?)
So, for instance, Eclipse offers a pre-built Java SE runtime called Temurin, maintained by Adoptium. Because there are multiple Java runtimes out there now, there’s a quality evaluation toolkit, too, called AQAvit. We’re only bringing up Adoptium and its tools because Canonical references them. Its enterprise Java datasheet [PDF] compares its “chiseled” containers with what it repeatedly calls the “Apache” Temurin ones – favorably, naturally. Apparently, they’re half the size. It also says that they’re tested with “Eclipse Aquavit” [sic], but honestly, after trying to nail this stuff down, we could use a stiff drink, too.
The gist is that you can easily install OpenJDK on Ubuntu. It’s tested, and you can obtain compliancy certification for it. Canonical has documentation on installing a development environment, and it also covers Java build tools such as Maven and Gradle. You can get long-term commercial support through Ubuntu Pro, which has been free for up to five machines for a few years now, and which since last year increased the long-term support lifetime from 10 years to 12.
There are wider aspects than this, as a May blog post on Discourse discussed. As well as the new Devpack for Spring, Ubuntu also supports building native binaries with GraalVM, a special CRaC JDK that enables taking snapshots of the entire Java environment. Outside of Java, it also offers Rust and Zig. Aside from Java, though, its main focus is .NET. As we covered in 2022, it built .NET 6 in as standard and, just a few months later, .NET 7 as well. .NET 10 is coming soon.
In terms of why this emphasis, it’s probably relevant to note the changing landscape outside of Ubuntu. As The Register reported in January, Oracle’s move to charge a lot more for Java licenses is not winning it any friends, with users urged to check their usage before the bills arrive. The change has stung UK higher education, despite some discounts. Separately, promoting its appeal for developers is a big part of the Fedora marketing, complete with a special developer portal. ®
Bootnote
Java SE, incidentally, refers to the Standard Edition, in other words the ordinary standalone version for local applications. The fancy corporate edition, once called Java Enterprise Edition, is now called Jakarta EE for reasons that no doubt made sense at some point. Java ME targeted mobile phones in the era before smartphones, but now it’s more aimed at the Internet of Things. As far as smartphones go, Android dominates and it uses Java too, but that is a whole other story.