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Alibaba Dragonwell8 FAQ

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sanhong edited this page Jan 12, 2023 · 13 revisions
  1. Q: What is Alibaba Dragonwell?

A: Alibaba Dragonwell is the long-term supported JDK (Java Development Kit) distribution from Alibaba. It is based on OpenJDK, and packaged with some Alibaba value-add patches.

  1. Q: Why should I use Alibaba Dragonwell?

A: Alibaba Dragonwell is the officially supported JDK distribution on Aliyun. It ships extra features widely used in Alibaba's production environment, and includes the latest bug-fixing patches.

  1. Q: How is Alibaba Dragonwell different from OpenJDK?

A: Alibaba Dragonwell is maintained by the Alibaba JVM team. It includes extra patches, e.g., Java Flight Recorder (JFR), that have already been exercised in Alibaba's production environment.

  1. Q: Does Alibaba plan to contribute Dragonwell's extra patches back to OpenJDK?

A: Yes. Alibaba has been trying to contribute features such as JWarmup and JFR backport to OpenJDK.

  1. Q: Is there any cost associated with using Alibaba Dragonwell?

A: Alibaba Dragonwell is under the same licensing terms as the upstream OpenJDK. You may obtain binary builds and source code of Alibaba Dragonwell from its GitHub page. Alibaba does not charge for using or distributing Alibaba Dragonwell JDK.

  1. Q: What should I do if I need help with Alibaba Dragonwell?

A: Please go to our GitHub page (github.com/alibaba/dragonwell) to create an issue. The developers from the Alibaba Dragonwell community will follow up.

You may also join the Dingtalk group via 35434688(Dingtalk group chat number) to participate in discussion.

  1. Q: What operating system does Alibaba Dragonwell support?

A: As of March 2019, Alibaba Dragonwell only supports Linux x86-64 systems.

  1. Q: Which JDK releases does Alibaba Dragonwell support?

A: As of March 2019, Alibaba Dragonwell only supports JDK8.

  1. Q: How to develop features based on Alibaba Dragonwell in Windows/MacOS ?

A: In order to facilitate the application development based on Alibaba Dragonwell specific APIs(e.g. JWarmUp, JFR..) on Windows/MacOS platform, the user can download API Jars from here and import them into the project class path in IDE. If you are using maven, please ensure these API Jars are placed in the following correct location and also add proper dependencies in pom.xml.

$HOME/.m2/repository/com/alibaba/dragonwell/java8-api/8.0.0/java8-api-8.0.0.jar
$HOME/.m2/repository/jdk/jfr/1.0.0/jfr-1.0.0.jar

<dependency>
  <groupId>jdk</groupId>
  <artifactId>jfr</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>com.alibaba.dragonwell</groupId>
  <artifactId>java8-api</artifactId>
  <version>8.0.0</version>
</dependency>

Alibaba Dragonwell

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