With the new licencing options Oracle is deploying with JDK 11 most developers are urging colleagues and clients to switch to OpenJDK. If you haven't already done so, here's a number of things to do when developing with Java
The choice for a JDK is up to you. There are several options to choose from and the blog-post by Stephen Colebouren linked above shows you an incentive to shy away from Oracle. And there are quite a number of options.
Let's start with Mac OSX, since I (and many of my colleagues) prefer either Mac OSX or Linux as a platform.
Homebrew at the moment only supports the Oracle standard JDK, but there is a way to add support for OpenJDK. For openjdk11 use:
brew cask install adoptopenjdk
Or use this cask (up to JDK12 as of Jne 2019): Use the cask for AdoptOpenJDK from this Github project.
brew tap AdoptOpenJDK/openjdk
brew install <version>
The different versions available are:
- adoptopenjdk8
- adoptopenjdk9
- adoptopenjdk10
- adoptopenjdk11
- adoptopenjdk12
Source: reply by George Adams on this topic.
There are different tools to manage and switch Java versions.
SDKman can be used on *nix systems like Mac OSX and Linux, but also in Windows. It can also manage Groovy versions. The downside is, that you are limited to the distributions included in SDKman, which are limited. It does not include 3rd party OpenJDK distributions.
JEnv can be used in Mac OSX and Linux. It can also be installed on Mac OSX using Homebrew and configured using:
brew install jenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.jenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'eval "$(jenv init -)"' >> ~/.bash_profile
The upside is, you can add any JDK version you install to the tool using the add command:
jenv add /usr/local/Cellar/adoptopenjdk-openjdk10/jdk-10.0.2+13/
jenv add /usr/local/Cellar/adoptopenjdk-openjdk8/jdk8u172-b11/
The downside is, you have to install these JDKs yourself, but with Homebrew and the above OpenJDKs that's fine.
Switch JVMs on command-line (for that directory) using this command:
jenv local 11
Jabba supports installation of a list of Java distributions and even from custom URLs. It can be used in MacOS, Linux, Docker containers and Windows 10 Powershell.
Configuring IntelliJ with JDKs should be quite easy. In Project Setting -> Project, then click New -> JDK.
Here comes the tricky part. If you install your JDK with a JDK management-tool, these will often be installed in a hidden directory.
You can enable showing hidden directories in the dialogue Mac OSX using shortcut cmd-shft-dot. Then browse to the directory
containing the bin-folder and click Open.
