Morpheus : I understand you perfectly. I will explain why you are here. Because you understand something. You cannot express it, but you feel it. You have felt throughout your life that the world is not in order - a strange thought, but you cannot drive it away. She is like a splinter in the brain. She's crazy. Haunts. This brought you to me. You know what I mean?

Neo : About a single site for downloading OpenJDK?

(Original photo: Neo realized which of the OpenJDK distributions needed to be downloaded).

Motivation

On the one hand, the six-month-long JDK release frequency and builds from many vendors helped disperse events in the Java world and gave a breath of fresh air. On the other hand, this breath of fresh air is not for everyone.

When talking with friends about Java, from the outside it is like traveling in a time machine: someone still thinks that there is an Oracle JDK and everyone else. Someone has already read blog posts that "Java is now paid and not free." Someone already knows that Java has remained free, but does not understand exactly where to download "these new versions." Someone has already decided on the choice of the distribution, but is surprised that the Shenandoah GC is not included in the JDK 12, where Shenandoah is one of the main features .

All this can be explained, but it takes too much time each time. Time is spent on the same thing. The suggestion is to create a simple flyer site with a download list and an explanation of the main points.

Yesterday, confronted with the need to explain again, I freaked out a bit and sawed off such a page.

Only seven characters: jdk.dev

You can read it out loud on the phone. You can add to twitter without fear: there will still be 273 characters. You can write blood on a napkin, like Yesenin.

Tasks

• Objectives : to provide a single place for downloading and receiving brief explanations, which is easy to verbally communicate to any person.
• Non-goals : to provide an absolutely neutral position (this is impossible, if only because someone should be at the top of the list of downloads, and someone at the bottom) or set up - to conduct a targeted campaign in favor of a specific solution. It is not intended to provide a CDN and thus replace the download pages of specific distributions: this site is about educating people and increasing the availability of distributions, and not about winding up advertising traffic.

Decision

The idea of ​​the site is quite obvious, and a lot of people came up with the idea. There is an assumption why no one made it: this is a political issue. If someone producing an industrial JDK makes such a page, all the rivets of the world will fall on him at once. For example, I heard criticism of Simon Ritter for the fact that he had the misfortune of trying to publicly explain the features of the new Java. On the other hand, if this is done by a person or group of people, completely uncomplicated and simply not needing power, everything will be much better. Therefore, I took and sawed such a page myself.

As a first step, all major distributions and popular specialized solutions are listed there. In order not to waste anyone’s time searching, the links go directly to the download page.

In the future, links to Docker Images, distribution packages, SDKMAN and other similar things will be added. You will definitely need to make articles with a brief description of manufacturers and distributions (for example, it is very important whether the TCK distribution passes and why). There are ideas on how to especially take care of Windows users who are forever in flight with beautiful packages.

As a platform for the prototype, Wordpress, modern PHP and MySQL are selected. Well, simply because it is the best modern platform for rapid prototyping of sites. Turning it all into a static site or something running on top of Micronaut or Quarkus is no problem. On the server, everything is spinning in docker under docker-compose on the latest images of the corresponding components (for example, MySQL 8.0.16 is now running), all this is closed on top of nginx and an ubunt firewall.

Alternatives

All this is searched in Google for a couple of queries. Unfortunately, you need to know what to look for - this is solved by the gradual penetration of information about the latest versions of JDK and major vendors among the general public. The basic vital information is in an open letter from Java champions and other recognized experts, which is stored in Google Docs .

The risks

The most important risk: the JDK brand is owned by Oracle Corporation, this is Trademark Class 9 in the United States. The .dev zone recorders are located in the USA. In Guidelines for Oracle Trademarksthey ask not to use Oracle trademarks or something similar to them in the domain name, because it may mislead the user that this site is official. That is why now and always in the title of the site should be an explanation that this site is not an official Oracle site. Nevertheless, if the Oracles lawyers decide that such use is unacceptable - well, you have to choose a less beautiful domain and radically reduce the number of words like Java and JDK on the page, rename the JDK to SDK and so on - well, you should have got used to it . Nothing terrible will happen from this, the maximum will be lost a certain number of hits in search engines. You will learn about such updates on Habré, on Twitter and other places.

The second risk lies in the dubious management structure. Suddenly I will stop refreshing the page, go crazy and write game there and so on. Therefore, it would be nice to transfer the page management to Mediawiki or make synchronization with GitHub and allow more competent people to write content. And then give out accounts (possibly anonymous) to recognized JDK experts and active community members. This is a separate interesting mechanism, but so far it’s just a page with several links - it makes no sense to mess around with it. Write to oleg@jdk.dev, and I will add or fix everything that is needed.

Next come the usual risks associated with infrastructure. For example, already now Namecheap forced me to switch to their paid DNS, because the free one did not work very well. At first, users of @jvmchat noticed this in a telegram, and then I myself started to get into the admin panel only from the fifth time. Tricky Plan, Namecheap, Tricky Plan!

All this is solved in a standard and very simple way, given that this is just a static site. By the way, this will neutralize the risks associated with hacking Wordpress - there is nothing so important that the experts at hacking Wordpress for some reason need to work so hard. If something still broke, it is repaired by pressing 1 button (replace the database with backup, merge container images again and deploy the infrastructure).

And even if all else fails, it was a good experiment!

Conclusion

After the link appeared in @jvmchat and @razbor_poletov_chat , I assumed that only directly familiar people would come there, and that would end it. Judging by google analytics, people from 29 countries came there, which means that the community still has some interest in such a page.

If you have questions and suggestions regarding the work of the page - write to oleg@jdk.dev, and public questions for discussion - here on Habré or in the two above-mentioned chats in the Cart. I live in the area of ​​the Vasileostrovskaya metro station in St. Petersburg.