News

Pivotal Adds Support for OpenJDK to its Spring Runtime

• By John K. Waters
• June 4, 2019

Pivotal, the company behind the open source Spring Framework, has announced the availability of Pivotal Spring Runtime, a comprehensive support package for Java environments that now includes support for OpenJDK. This release also extends its commercial support for open source Apache Tomcat servers and all major open source Spring projects, including Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud and Spring Cloud Dataflow. Other projects are also supported. The company has a published a complete list on the Pivotal Spring Runtime product page.

It's the OpenJDK support that will likely grab developers' attention, because it's the move that brings Spring up to speed with Oracle's new accelerated Java release cadence. The time-based release schedule for the Java SE Platform and the JDK provides a feature release every six months, update releases every quarter and a long-term support release every three years.

Pivotal began gearing up for the faster release schedule last year. In December, Spring Framework project co-founder Juergen Hoeller told attendees at the second annual SpringOne Platform developer conference in San Francisco that the change could be "quite a challenge, and quite disruptive to the Java ecosystem. Many tools are based on bytecode generation, possessing libraries such as ASM, CGLib, ByteBuddy. They historically have not needed to evolve to leniently embrace new JDK generations. They have evolved to be designed for a particular set of JDK versions only, and they had to be updated every single time."

"So, we'll have to change our minds a little," he added. "We'll have to design our infrastructure, our bytecode processing, in such a way that a new JDK generation is a totally normal thing."

In a blog post announcing the Spring Runtime, published last week, Ryan Morgan, Pivotal's VP of Engineering, explained that Pivotal's move was initiated to address questions his team was hearing from the community about the new release cadence. "Many companies and enterprises are scrambling trying to understand their options around support of their application investments," Morgan wrote.

Pivotal is addressing these concerns, Morgan said, in the new release with a specific list of feature, including:

• Pivotal Distribution of OpenJDK: Pivotal's OpenJDK distribution includes ongoing support, plus regular security and performance updates. Pivotal also recently signed on as a Platinum Sponsor of AdoptOpenJDK to help advance the interests of the OpenJDK community.
• Spring Support: Pivotal now offers commercial support for the most popular Spring projects, including Spring Framework, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Cloud Dataflow, among others.
• Apache Tomcat Support: Pivotal supports the open-source project, as well as Pivotal tc Server, Pivotal's open-core enterprise extended edition of Tomcat. Pivotal Spring Runtime customers can expect regular security patches and other updates.

Pivotal Spring Runtime is available now via several pricing plans explained in the Product Guide.