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Nicolas Frankel
Nicolas Frankel

Posted on • Originally published at blog.frankel.ch

Most commonly available JDKs

For reasons I dare not mention, I had to install version 7 of the JDK a couple of months ago. As a Mac user, my usual way of installing is using Homebrew. To install a JDK, this is as easy as brew cask install adoptopenjdkx, where x is the Java version. It didn't work, as AdoptOpenJDK provides no version 7.

It took me some time to find a JDK 7. In the end, I found one in Zulu - thanks to Azul. Coupled to the fact that I also learned Alibaba provided a JDK and I got curious: how many JDK providers are out there? The next question is: which JDK can I use?

The matter can be confusing as a whole bunch of different JDKs is available. The OpenJDK project plays a big role in this ecosystem. Different developers jointly work on the OpenJDK codebase. They can be employees of software companies, including Oracle, Google, IBM, and Red Hat as part of their regular job. One can also work as an individual contributor to the codebase.

Vendors use OpenJDK as an upstream repository: individual vendors add additional features. The following diagram by Aleksey Shipilëv sums it up:

OpenJDK update releases

Without further ado, here are some of the most widespread JDK providers:

JDK Provider Available versions Miscellaneous
Oracle JDK Oracle Builds for different Java projects under development:
Adoptium Eclipse
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
Dragonwell Alibaba According to their own words:
Optimized for online e-commerce, financial, logistics applications running on 100,000+ servers
  • Supports Linux/x86_64 platform only
Corretto Amazon
Zulu Azul
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16-ea
Liberica BellSoft
Red Hat build of OpenJDK
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
Sap Machine SAP
  • 11
  • 15
  • 16-ea
Features contributed by SAP

To go further:

Originally published at A Java Geek on November 22th 2020

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