News

Eclipse Foundation and the Adoptium Working Group Launch the Adoptium Marketplace

• By John K. Waters
• May 26, 2022

The Eclipse Foundation and the Adoptium Working Group today announced a new marketplace for Java SE TCK-certified and AQAvit quality-tested binaries. The Adoptium Marketplace, now officially open for business, was created to provide working group members with what Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich describes as “a vendor-neutral home where they can promote Java SE runtimes that meet specific quality assurance criteria.”

“If you’re a Java developer looking for distributions of OpenJDK, you now have a single place to go where you can find the combined offerings of most of the leading vendors in this space,” Milinkovich told ADTmag. “We’ve got a really good cross section coming together in the marketplace. They won’t all be in it from day one, but they’ve all committed to getting there.”

The Adoptium Working Group, which was founded by a roster of Java developers and vendors that includes IBM, Red Hat, Azul, New Relic, Alibaba Cloud, and Huawei, among others, aims to provide the Java ecosystem with fully compatible, high-quality distributions of Java runtimes based on OpenJDK source code.

Adoptium (formerly AdoptOpenJDK) is a top-level Eclipse project focused on producing high-quality runtimes and associated technology for use within the Java ecosystem. Adoptium’s JDKs are called Eclipse Temurin. Temurin binaries are provided at no cost to use under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 with the Classpath Exception.

All of the OpenJDK distributions on the Adoptium Marketplace must be Java TCK certified. (The TCK—Technology Compatibility Kit—is the official Java SE test suite.) They must also pass a set of quality tests curated by the Eclipse AQAvit project.

“For the first time you have a group of vendors in the Java ecosystem rallying around, not only a compatibility standard, but a quality standard,” Milinkovich said. “That’s a major milestone, and it’s an opportunity for the industry going forward to put a stake in the ground in terms of what a quality OpenJDK runtime looks like.”

The Adoptium Marketplace complements the Working Group’s efforts by delivering a trusted location where developers and enterprises can obtain compatible binaries of OpenJDK builds, the Foundation said in a statement.

The marketplace has been in the works for three years, explained Tim Ellison, Red Hat Distinguished Engineer, and Principal Architect in the Java Runtimes Technology group at IBM. Ellison, who is an Adoptium Project lead, says the group picked a “sweet spot” in terms of what developers are looking for.

“We started life as AdoptOpenJDK in 2017 to address the general lack of an open, community-based, and reproducible build and test system for OpenJDK across multiple platforms, and we track downloads from people still using that domain name, as well as Adoptium,” he said. “In the past 11 months, we’ve seen 35 million downloads from adoptium.net. But if you back up to our legacy endpoints, it’s 395 million downloads. It’s clear that we’ve really struck a chord with people.”  

A number of Adoptium Working Group members announced plans to participate in the new marketplace. Huawei says it will list BiSheng, the company’s OpenJDK distribution optimized for the ARM architecture, on the new marketplace. IBM plans to list its Semeru Runtimes, free production-ready binaries built with the OpenJDK class libraries and the Eclipse OpenJ9 JVM, the company said. Azul says it’s ready to list its builds of OpenJDK on the marketplace. Microsoft says it will be contributing to the Adoptium marketplace with the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, a free OpenJDK distribution that is optimized for, and supported on Azure. And Red Hat, which has a long tradition of working with open-source communities, plans to list its build of OpenJDK on the new marketplace.

Organizations interested in participating in the Adoptium Working Group—and you must be a working group member to list on the new marketplace—can view the Charter and Participation Agreement online.