Morpheus : I understand you perfectly. Let me explain why you are here. Because you understood something. You cannot express it, but you feel it. You have felt all your life that the world is not in order — a strange thought, but you cannot drive it away. She is like a pain in the brain. She is crazy. Does not give rest. That led you to me. You know what I mean?

Neo : About a single site for downloading OpenJDK?

(Genuine photo: Neo realized which distribution of OpenJDK should be downloaded).

Motivation

On the one hand, the frequency of JDK releases in half a year and builds from many vendors helped disperse events in the Java world, gave a breath of fresh air. On the other hand, this breath of fresh air does not go to all.

When you talk with your friends about Java, from the outside it looks like traveling in a time machine: someone still thinks that there is an Oracle JDK and all the rest. 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 distribution, but surprised that Shenandoah GC is not included in 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 proposal is to create a simple flyer site with a list of downloads and an explanation of the main points.

Yesterday, I had to explain once again, I was a little freaked out and wrote down such a page.

Only seven characters: jdk.dev

You can read it out loud on the phone. You can, without fear of adding to Twitter: there are still 273 characters. You can write in blood on a napkin, like Yesenin.

Tasks

• Objectives : to provide a single place for downloading and brief explanations, which is easy to verbally communicate to anyone.
• Non-goals : to provide an absolutely neutral position (this is impossible if only because someone has to be at the top of the download list, and someone is at the bottom) or a set of campaigns - to conduct a targeted campaign in favor of some particular 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 making distributions more accessible, not about reeling in advertising traffic.

Decision

The idea of ​​the site is quite obvious, and many people came to mind. There is an assumption why no one did it: this is a political question. If someone producing an industrial JDK makes such a page, all the slander of the world will fall on him at the same time. For example, I heard criticism in the direction of Simon Ritter already for the fact that he had the misfortune to try to publicly explain the features of the new java. On the other hand, if this is done by a person or a group of people, completely uncomplicated and simply not in need of power, everything will be much better. Therefore, I took and wrote down such a page myself.

As a first step, all major distributions and popular custom solutions are listed there. In order not to waste anyone searching, links go straight to the download page.

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

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

Alternatives

All this is searched in Google for a couple of requests. 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 the main vendors among the masses. The main vital information is in an open letter to Java champions and other recognized experts, which is stored in Google Docs .

Risks

The biggest risk: JDK is a trademark owned by Oracle Corporation, this is Trademark Class 9 in the United States. Registrars of the .dev zone are located in the USA. In the Guidelines for Oracle Trademarks document, they are asked not to use Oracle or any similar to them in the domain name, because it can be confusing to the user that this site is official. That is why now and always in the header of the site there should be an explanation that this site is not an official Oracle site. However, if the Oracle lawyers decide that such use is unacceptable - well, you have to choose a less beautiful domain and drastically reduce the number of words like Java and JDK on the page, rename the JDK to SDK and so on - well, you should already get used . Nothing terrible will happen because of this, the maximum will be lost some number of hits in search engines. You will learn about such updates on Habré, on Twitter and other places.

The second risk is in the questionable management structure. Suddenly I’ll stop updating the page, go crazy and write game and so on. Therefore, it would be nice to transfer pages to Mediawiki or make synchronization with GitHub and give the opportunity to write content to more competent people. And then issue accounts (possibly anonymous) to recognized JDK development experts and active members of the community. This is a separate interesting mechanism, but for now this is just a page with several links - it makes no sense to mess around with it especially. Write to oleg@jdk.dev, and I will add or fix everything I need.

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

All this is solved in a standard and very simple way, given that this is just a static site. By the way, this also neutralizes the risks associated with Wordpress hacking - there is nothing so important there that Wordpress hack specialists for some reason need to be so tense. If something still broke, then it is repaired by pressing 1 button (replace the base with a backup, re-merge the images of the containers and deploy the infrastructure).

And even if it didn't work out, 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 this would all end. Judging by the Google analytics, people have already arrived from 29 countries, which means that there is some interest in such a page from the community.

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