[Geoserver-devel] [Live-demo] OpenJDK Only for LiveDVD 5.5?

GeoServer GeoServer Developer
,
1

Geoserver-Devel, Jody,

As per email thread below, the OSGeo-Live project is looking for guidance on what we should do regarding a migration to OpenJDK.

The brief facts:

  • Sun Java is not allowed to be packaged into future distributions (like ubuntu, debian, or OSGeo-Live). Instead, users are expected to download SunJava from Sun.
  • SunJava 7 will be based upon OpenJDK.
  • OpenJDK is reportedly much better than previous OpenJDK versions.

For OSGeo-Live:

  • OSGeo-Live v5.5 (released in March 2012) will be based upon the older Xubuntu 10.04, so at a pinch, we can still use Sun java, (but won’t be able to accept security updates). For OSGeo-Live v6.0 (Sept 2012), we intend to use Xubuntu 12.04, and hence will only be able to use OpenJDK.
  • OSGeo-Live is space limited, and we strongly prefer to only include one flavour of java, otherwise we need to remove some of our windows installers.

So bottom line is that java applications which wish to be included in Linux distributions will need to support OpenJDK soon, and this is coming to a head as we package OSGeo-Live.

Questions for Geotools developers:

  1. Do geotools based applications work on OpenJDK now?
  2. Is it possible to migrate geotools based applications to OpenJDK?
  3. Can such migration happen before Feb 2012 (for OSGeo-Live 5.5)?

We can help with testing packaged applications, but are looking for guidance from projects on where we should be focusing our energy.

On 31/12/11 19:34, Jody Garnett wrote:

An easy one is to add the extensions into libs/ext and then run uDig without its “jre” folder so it uses the system default.

Geosolutions (i.e. Simone or Andrea) is the best point of contact with respect to compatibility with OpenJDK. Personally I was not going to bother until Java 7 or Java 8.

You could also try talking to Andrea Antonello who at least uses Linux and may be able to test?

If you want you can also contact me officially as “GeoTools Officer” and I will take the question to the geotools-devel email list for you. However I expect I need a more than “Open JDK” (this page for example does not give me much to work from http://openjdk.java.net/install/).

–
Jody Garnett

On Friday, 30 December 2011 at 9:02 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:

Jody and others,

Do you know if anyone has tested the viability of using OpenJDK with JAI/ImageIO/ImageIO-EXT (with the geotools based applications)?

What would be involved in testing this? Who would know how?

On 30/12/11 20:29, Jody Garnett wrote:

Need to check out how well or poorly OpenJDK does with the JAI / ImageIO / ImageIO-EXT combo for geotools based apps.

–
Jody Garnett

On Friday, 30 December 2011 at 6:48 PM, Brian Hamlin wrote:

jsanz tells me that GeoNetwork is also running well under OpenJDK for
him

let this thread be an entrypoint for Java-app contacts to express their
enthusiasm, dismay, pain, resignation or otherwise on the adaptation
of an OpenJDK-only LiveDVD release

best regards from Berkeley, California

==
Brian Hamlin
GeoCal
OSGeo California Chapter
415-717-4462 cell

Live-demo mailing list
Live-demo@anonymised.com
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo
http://live.osgeo.org
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc


_______________________________________________
Live-demo mailing list
[Live-demo@anonymised.com](mailto:Live-demo@anonymised.com)
[http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo](http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo)
[http://live.osgeo.org](http://live.osgeo.org)
[http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc](http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc)

--  
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Director
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
[http://www.lisasoft.com](http://www.lisasoft.com)
2

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 11:26 PM, Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter@anonymised.com> wrote:

Geoserver-Devel, Jody,

As per email thread below, the OSGeo-Live project is looking for guidance on what we should do regarding a migration to OpenJDK.

The brief facts:

  • Sun Java is not allowed to be packaged into future distributions (like ubuntu, debian, or OSGeo-Live). Instead, users are expected to download SunJava from Sun.
  • SunJava 7 will be based upon OpenJDK.
  • OpenJDK is reportedly much better than previous OpenJDK versions.

For OSGeo-Live:

  • OSGeo-Live v5.5 (released in March 2012) will be based upon the older Xubuntu 10.04, so at a pinch, we can still use Sun java, (but won’t be able to accept security updates). For OSGeo-Live v6.0 (Sept 2012), we intend to use Xubuntu 12.04, and hence will only be able to use OpenJDK.
  • OSGeo-Live is space limited, and we strongly prefer to only include one flavour of java, otherwise we need to remove some of our windows installers.

So bottom line is that java applications which wish to be included in Linux distributions will need to support OpenJDK soon, and this is coming to a head as we package OSGeo-Live.

To my knowledge there has been no effort to support OpenJDK, it’s not used in production in any serious place I know of and
last time I checked graphics performance was very poor, not to mention resulting in poorer quality maps.
Again afaik, none of the developers is using it, nor the build server is testing it.

Also please consider that both Geotools and GeoServer are likely to stay on JDK 6 for quite some time (JDK 6 EOL is
June 2012, my guess is that we’ll stay on it for another 6-12 months past that), so any
improvement in OpenJDK 7 won’t help us much.

Given that business requirements are still squarely on Oracle JDK we’d need some OpenJDK “champion” that takes care of
supporting that enviroment, finds all the changes necessary to make the apps work reliably on it, and pushes to get the
same in the code base. If someone shows up that wants to carry on the task I’ll be happy to help with a portion of my
weekend spare time hours.

Another option is that the PSC of both projects votes to start supporting OpenJDK, dedicating the effort to get there and
the continous effort to keep it there (who wants to try the build on both JDK 6 and OpenJDK before committing?.. hmmm)

Cheers
Andrea

–

Ing. Andrea Aime
GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Tech lead

Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
55054 Massarosa (LU)
Italy

phone: +39 0584 962313
fax: +39 0584 962313
mob: +39 339 8844549

http://www.geo-solutions.it
http://geo-solutions.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/GeoSolutionsIT
http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreaaime
http://twitter.com/geowolf

Please take note that GeoSolutions will be closed for Christmas holidays from 27/12 to 30/12

3

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Andrea Aime <andrea.aime@anonymised.com1268…> wrote:

The brief facts:

  • Sun Java is not allowed to be packaged into future distributions (like ubuntu, debian, or OSGeo-Live). Instead, users are expected to download SunJava from Sun.
  • SunJava 7 will be based upon OpenJDK.
  • OpenJDK is reportedly much better than previous OpenJDK versions.

Hmmm… I wanted to run a benchmark to substantiate this claim but there are no OpenJDK 7 binaries available
for my aging Ubuntu 10.04 (which I’ll upgrade only when the new LTS shows up).

Also, on Windows there are no OpenJDK builds so in the end we need to target Oracle JDK anyways (besides
the obvious business reasons), this means a OpenJDK support will have to come in parallel (aka “more work”)

Cheers
Andrea

–

Ing. Andrea Aime
GeoSolutions S.A.S.
Tech lead

Via Poggio alle Viti 1187
55054 Massarosa (LU)
Italy

phone: +39 0584 962313
fax: +39 0584 962313
mob: +39 339 8844549

http://www.geo-solutions.it
http://geo-solutions.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/GeoSolutionsIT
http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreaaime
http://twitter.com/geowolf

Please take note that GeoSolutions will be closed for Christmas holidays from 27/12 to 30/12

4

Le dimanche 01 janvier 2012 19:03:33, Andrea Aime a écrit :

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Andrea Aime <andrea.aime@anonymised.com

solutions.it>wrote:

> The brief facts:
>> * Sun Java is not allowed to be packaged into future distributions (like
>> ubuntu, debian, or OSGeo-Live). Instead, users are expected to download
>> SunJava from Sun.
>> * SunJava 7 will be based upon OpenJDK.
>> * OpenJDK is reportedly much better than previous OpenJDK versions.

Hmmm.... I wanted to run a benchmark to substantiate this claim but there
are no OpenJDK 7 binaries available
for my aging Ubuntu 10.04 (which I'll upgrade only when the new LTS shows
up).

Also, on Windows there are no OpenJDK builds so in the end we need to
target Oracle JDK anyways (besides
the obvious business reasons), this means a OpenJDK support will have to
come in parallel (aka "more work")

Not sure how/if it can help for geoserver/geotools, but I can give you some of
my experience with OpenJDK6 and Windows. I have ported a quite big Java app
from Sun Java 1.4.2 -> Sun Java 1.6.0 -> OpenJDK 1.6.0 and it is now in
production in our client.

It is true that there are no Windows OpenJDK builds easily found. I finally
build mine. The hardest part was to gather all the requirements (cygwin,
directx headers, freetype, GNU make, etc...), plus some undocumented issues
that I finally identified as being due to my use of a non-English version of
MSVC. But overall I found that the build instructions worked well if you
follow them closely. Lately, I've updated to the build b23 and found that the
building process was a bit easier than during my first experience that dated
back to more than 1 year 1/2.

As far as the port of the app is concerned, most problems found were due to an
inadequate use of some bits of the Java API where the Sun Java 1.4.2/1.6
implementation were permissive, but the OpenJDK one not. When looking at the
docs, we realized that we were relying on unspecified behaviour. The most
problematic was due to an inadequate use of threading with AWT (use of AWT
from another thread than the AWT event dispatch thread).

The other most problematic part I can recall was related to font rendering.
The font engine of the windows openjdk build uses freetype whereas the
commercial version uses a closed-source engine. This required adjusting font
sizes in GUIs and setting some anti-aliasing hints.

I'm not sure if the changes we did would have been necessary if we had
targetted JDK7/OpenJDK7 directly instead of OpenJDK6, but at the time they
were done it wasn't yet released.

Best regards,

Even

5

Questions for Geotools developers:

  1. Do geotools based applications work on OpenJDK now?

Not sure; even if they did without a build box configured with OpenJDK to ensure the library works in that environment it would not be considered a supported platform for production use. I always figure “demo” is almost more important then production use as it is a first impression.

By the same token I would not recommend projects based on GeoTools go live on OpenJDK without appropriate testing.

Perhaps the Geomajas guys could stand up a build box with OpenJDK?

  1. Is it possible to migrate geotools based applications to OpenJDK?

Yes; would required volunteer time; hardware to run a nightly build with that configuration and so on. I recently lost two weeks to a build box at my current work site that was incorrectly configured to use OpenJDK rather than Java 6.

  1. Can such migration happen before Feb 2012 (for OSGeo-Live 5.5)?

We can help with testing packaged applications, but are looking for guidance from projects on where we should be focusing our energy.

I do not think so; we would need hardware in place now.

Our developers are an even split between mac, linux and windows environments. As I understand it mac OpenJDK is not ready yet (with no sign of arrival); windows is troubled.

I would wait for OpenJDK Java 7 to be released; and then set up a build box at that time.

Jody

On 31/12/11 19:34, Jody Garnett wrote:

An easy one is to add the extensions into libs/ext and then run uDig without its “jre” folder so it uses the system default.

Geosolutions (i.e. Simone or Andrea) is the best point of contact with respect to compatibility with OpenJDK. Personally I was not going to bother until Java 7 or Java 8.

You could also try talking to Andrea Antonello who at least uses Linux and may be able to test?

If you want you can also contact me officially as “GeoTools Officer” and I will take the question to the geotools-devel email list for you. However I expect I need a more than “Open JDK” (this page for example does not give me much to work from http://openjdk.java.net/install/).

–
Jody Garnett

On Friday, 30 December 2011 at 9:02 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:

Jody and others,

Do you know if anyone has tested the viability of using OpenJDK with JAI/ImageIO/ImageIO-EXT (with the geotools based applications)?

What would be involved in testing this? Who would know how?

On 30/12/11 20:29, Jody Garnett wrote:

Need to check out how well or poorly OpenJDK does with the JAI / ImageIO / ImageIO-EXT combo for geotools based apps.

–
Jody Garnett

On Friday, 30 December 2011 at 6:48 PM, Brian Hamlin wrote:

jsanz tells me that GeoNetwork is also running well under OpenJDK for
him

let this thread be an entrypoint for Java-app contacts to express their
enthusiasm, dismay, pain, resignation or otherwise on the adaptation
of an OpenJDK-only LiveDVD release

best regards from Berkeley, California

==
Brian Hamlin
GeoCal
OSGeo California Chapter
415-717-4462 cell

Live-demo mailing list
Live-demo@anonymised.com
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo
http://live.osgeo.org
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc


_______________________________________________
Live-demo mailing list
[Live-demo@...1232...](mailto:Live-demo@anonymised.com)
[http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo](http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo)
[http://live.osgeo.org](http://live.osgeo.org)
[http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc](http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc)

--   
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Director
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
[http://www.lisasoft.com](http://www.lisasoft.com)
6

Andre, Even, Jody,
Thank you for your insights.
Based on your advice, it sounds like it will be unwise to try to migrate all java based OSGeo applications to OpenJDK by our OSGeo-Live5.5 release due in March 2012.

As such, I propose that Sun Java be included on OSGeo-Live5.5.

I’m hopeful that we can find enough space to include OpenJDK, (ideally version 7) on this and future OSGeo-Live releases, and start moving all applications across to OpenJDK as soon as they are available. This will mean that the OSGeo-Live community can be drawn upon to help with testing which hopefully can be seen as a positive for java projects.

Does this sound reasonable?

Alex, it would be great if you could start the build process so that we can determine whether we can find sufficient space to include 2 versions of java on OSGeo-Live.

On 03/01/12 13:29, Jody Garnett wrote:

Questions for Geotools developers:

  1. Do geotools based applications work on OpenJDK now?

Not sure; even if they did without a build box configured with OpenJDK to ensure the library works in that environment it would not be considered a supported platform for production use. I always figure “demo” is almost more important then production use as it is a first impression.

By the same token I would not recommend projects based on GeoTools go live on OpenJDK without appropriate testing.

Perhaps the Geomajas guys could stand up a build box with OpenJDK?

  1. Is it possible to migrate geotools based applications to OpenJDK?

Yes; would required volunteer time; hardware to run a nightly build with that configuration and so on. I recently lost two weeks to a build box at my current work site that was incorrectly configured to use OpenJDK rather than Java 6.

  1. Can such migration happen before Feb 2012 (for OSGeo-Live 5.5)?

We can help with testing packaged applications, but are looking for guidance from projects on where we should be focusing our energy.

I do not think so; we would need hardware in place now.

Our developers are an even split between mac, linux and windows environments. As I understand it mac OpenJDK is not ready yet (with no sign of arrival); windows is troubled.

I would wait for OpenJDK Java 7 to be released; and then set up a build box at that time.

Jody

On 31/12/11 19:34, Jody Garnett wrote:

An easy one is to add the extensions into libs/ext and then run uDig without its “jre” folder so it uses the system default.

Geosolutions (i.e. Simone or Andrea) is the best point of contact with respect to compatibility with OpenJDK. Personally I was not going to bother until Java 7 or Java 8.

You could also try talking to Andrea Antonello who at least uses Linux and may be able to test?

If you want you can also contact me officially as “GeoTools Officer” and I will take the question to the geotools-devel email list for you. However I expect I need a more than “Open JDK” (this page for example does not give me much to work from http://openjdk.java.net/install/).

–
Jody Garnett

On Friday, 30 December 2011 at 9:02 PM, Cameron Shorter wrote:

Jody and others,

Do you know if anyone has tested the viability of using OpenJDK with JAI/ImageIO/ImageIO-EXT (with the geotools based applications)?

What would be involved in testing this? Who would know how?

On 30/12/11 20:29, Jody Garnett wrote:

Need to check out how well or poorly OpenJDK does with the JAI / ImageIO / ImageIO-EXT combo for geotools based apps.

–
Jody Garnett

On Friday, 30 December 2011 at 6:48 PM, Brian Hamlin wrote:

jsanz tells me that GeoNetwork is also running well under OpenJDK for
him

let this thread be an entrypoint for Java-app contacts to express their
enthusiasm, dismay, pain, resignation or otherwise on the adaptation
of an OpenJDK-only LiveDVD release

best regards from Berkeley, California

==
Brian Hamlin
GeoCal
OSGeo California Chapter
415-717-4462 cell

Live-demo mailing list
Live-demo@anonymised.com
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo
http://live.osgeo.org
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc


_______________________________________________
Live-demo mailing list
[Live-demo@anonymised.com](mailto:Live-demo@anonymised.com)
[http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo](http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo)
[http://live.osgeo.org](http://live.osgeo.org)
[http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc](http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc)

--   
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Director
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
[http://www.lisasoft.com](http://www.lisasoft.com)