The Eclipse Adoptium community has achieved its first Java SE release based upon the OpenJDK code. Adoptium is the new home of the AdoptOpenJDK project, the most popular build of OpenJDK in production according to the recent JVM Ecosystem Report, with over 300 million downloads.

Adoptium’s success builds upon the community development of Java SE in OpenJDK. OpenJDK creates the implementation of Java SE and Adoptium performs the structured build, test, and delivery to end users. Red Hat has brought best in class working practices to these projects to deliver high quality binaries that are ready for production usage.

Red Hat engineers have a strong representation in the Adoptium project management committee and Red Hat is a strategic member of the Adoptium working group. Together the project management committee and working group provide technical and governance oversight of the project.

This release from Adoptium is the first from the Eclipse Foundation. As part of the move to Eclipse, Adoptium code underwent enhanced scrutiny through the Eclipse intellectual property review process, and the project’s binaries have passed the Oracle Java SE JCK test suite—- used to determine compatibility with the Java SE specification.

Digital-Transformation-Minispot-Technology-illustration-quote copy_Blog-thumbnail.pngAdoptium employs “infrastructure as code” principles utilizing Ansible to define the dynamic build system in a hybrid cloud environment. Working with the open source community Red Hat has automated the creation of reproducible build systems across multiple CPU and OS environments using Ansible scripts.

All Adoptium’s binaries are passed through the Eclipse AQAvit quality program as part of the release process. AQAvit not only checks functional correctness of the runtime, but also puts the runtime under long-running stress workloads, checks the runtime performance characteristics and tests whether a range of known security vulnerabilities have been fixed.  When a binary is deemed ready for release, it’s made available through the Adoptium project’s API. This web service API is written in Java and currently handles about 550 thousand requests every day. The web service is implemented using the Quarkus framework and deployed in OpenShift running on Microsoft Azure.

Following open principles, any working group member whose build meets the project's requirements can promote their product through Adoptium, and members may include community or paid support options around their binaries.

Moving a project of this size is an incredible feat and the community worked very well to arrive at a successful outcome. Red Hat looks forward to contributing to the continued success at Adoptium.

Red Hat offers support for OpenJDK binaries as part of your RHEL subscription, as part of your OpenShift subscription, or via the Red Hat Build of OpenJDK product offering.


About the author

Tim Ellison is a Distinguished Engineer and Principal Architect at Red Hat. He has worked on enterprise runtime technologies for more than thirty years, primarily focused on open source communities and best practices. Previously the Java CTO for IBM, Tim is an invited member of numerous specification committees, including the Java SE platform specification, and he has contributed to a diverse range of projects including AdoptOpenJDK, Smalltalk, Apache Harmony, Eclipse JDT, Apache Spark, and Quantum Computing libraries. He holds numerous patents in runtime technology and speaks at conferences worldwide.

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