Another giant shows its support for Java. The news is that
Google has joined the Adoptium Working Group and is making Temurin available across Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products and services. So what's the deal?

Microsoft is already a strategic member of the Adoptium Working Group and now Google follows suit. As Cameron Balahan, Senior Product Manager at Google Cloud, said at the recent Google Cloud Next ‘22 Event in a session entitled 5 reasons why your Java apps are better on Google Cloud:

We're committed to making Google Cloud the best cloud for Java which extends even further to your core Java tools and even your runtime. To that end I'm pleased to announce that Google has joined the Eclipse Adoptium working group, a consortium of leaders in the Java community and makers of the Temurin build of Openjdk.

Temurin is one of the world's most popular jdk distributions certified by Adoptium for heightened compatibility and security testing. As a member of Adoptium Google will make Temurin available across GCP products and services providing Java customers the highest standard of enterprise security and more opportunities to create integrated security focused solutions.

That is, following Microsoft's footsteps pushing its Azure offerings to the Java industry, Google is trying the same with Google Cloud.

So the major vendor builds of the OpenJDK, act as the trojan horse for the big names to establish a foothold onto the evolving and rich Cloud platform market - it's where the money is.

Microsoft released its own build of Java's OpenJDK while at the same time also supporting the Temurin builds. OpenJDK is the first step in the ladder, though. As I discussed in Microsoft Goes All Out on Java, the next step in winning the hearts and minds of the Java developers who have the first saying in the choice of the deployment platform, is to shower them with convenient functionality, helping them to migrate their applications and of course by offering quality documentation.

That's the approach Google is adopting by providing with sessions like 5 reasons why your Java apps are better on Google Cloud which details how convenient is to build Java Cloud apps on GCP.

As far as the Temurin build itself goes, its dynamics are very strong as evident by the major players going all out on it. For instance, RedHat, already a strategic partner and ample contributor to the project, has gone one step beyond by announcing LTS support.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that that move was necessary in order to establish quality across OpenJDK:

“With the increasing volume and diversity of OpenJDK runtime distributions, it’s become clear that quality and consistency across the ecosystem must be established. "

And quality is interwoven with Eclipse Temurin, the most popular distribution of OpenJDK as of 2021 according to Snyk's survey, hosting cross-platform, open-source licensed, and TCK-certified for Java SE binaries.

Under Eclipse AQAvit, the project that was created specifically as a means of setting the criteria that ensure that a binary is ready for production deployment, Temurin scores high:

Release artifacts are produced for 350, 000+ automated tests on more than 100+ test machines and OS platforms, meeting the modern requirements which include containerized tests. The tests are categorized into the following:

• Security: Testing all known security vulnerabilities.
  
  
• Functional correctness: Using OpenJDK regression, functional, and key application/framework tests.
  
  
• Performance: Ensuring and achieving minimum throughput scores with published metrics.
  
  
• Scalability and durability: Meets minimum load and stress testing requirements.

Google is already making an impression to the project by, in partnership with Alibaba, kickstarting the Eclipse Adoptium FastStartup Incubator project. The aim is to make Java faster by exploring things like class pre-initialization.

So is Temurin the build to rule them all?

In any case, conditional love by the big corps or not, that the project has their backing and that they actively get involved in JDK's development is a testament to Java's resurgence and potential. 

More Information

Adoptium Welcomes Google

Related Articles

Eclipse Temurin OpenJDK Now Supported By Red Hat
Microsoft Goes All Out On Java 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info