Background

Back in August 2021, I raised the question about the ongoing production of Java Runtime Environment(JRE) binaries for Eclipse Temurin. That led to one of the longest threads of discussion we’ve had at the project, with strong feelings expressed both for and against the idea.

Briefly, the question arose because the upstream OpenJDK source project has declared JREs to be “legacy” beyond Java version 8, with a recommendation to move to using jlink and produce customized runtimes that only contain those Java modules that an application actually uses.

At the Eclipse Adoptium project, we spent time exploring and evaluating various options in collaboration with our development and user community. Our decision was to stop publishing general purpose JREs from Java 17 onwards. That decision was based upon the likelihood that support for building the “legacy” JREs will be removed from OpenJDK in the future, the desirable characteristics of the jlinked binaires, and very importantly the impact of creating JREs on the Adoptium projects’ workload.

We have published helpful guides for how to create your own JRE using jlink and how to use jlink in Dockerfiles that remain useful today.

Listening to our user community

Adoptium has a very loyal user community, and they were keen to let us know that even with knowledge of the jlink tool, the availability of general purpose Eclipse Temurin JREs directly from the Adoptium project was highly valued. There are a number of use cases for reusable runtimes that just don’t fit well with the jlink model for developers.

Adoptium has always focused on ensuring that the quality of our runtime binaries remains very high. The Temurin Compliance Project checks that each runtime is Java standards compliant, then Eclipse AQAvit verifies the quality of the runtime for use in production environments through an extensive battery of testing and analysis.

Our users want both the convenience of a JRE package and the AQAvit quality assurance provided by the Adoptium project. As such, the Adoptium Project Management Committee (PMC) redoubled efforts to be able to create and maintain JREs for Java 17 onwards.

Eclipse Temurin JREs are back

Adoptium is a community-driven project. We are here for our users, and we succeed by the kind efforts of our development community supported by the working group members and sponsors.

The earlier decision to stop creating JREs from Java 17 onwards has been reversed, and we will continue to publish JREs for as long as it remains technically feasible to do so.

JREs for Eclipse Temurin 17 have been published via adoptium.net, the project API, and Dockerhub. We continue to encourage feedback about how the project is operating, what we can do better, and always welcome new members and sponsors.