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With the recent announcements from Oracle side, we have started to work on a plan for phasing out migration from the Sun JVM to the whatever reliable and free alternative we will end up with.

Open JDK will obviously become a major option, now that IBM has announced its focus on it, but it will take some time for that to be an alternative to Sun's existing JVMs, in terms of stability and reliability.

Are there any JVM options out there, which are powering real life mission critical applications? IBM's JVM can't be used on other than IBM hardware as far as I know.

If you know of any alternatives which may help us depict a picture of the JVM domain, your feedback would be much appreciated.

We have large work on Eclipse ecosystems, backed up with jboss application servers and we're really interested in knowing our options now that access to Oracle's JVM is likely to require licencing fees.

skaffman
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mahonya
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    What recent announcements from Oracle are you referring to? – Asaph Nov 16 '10 at 14:13
  • @Asaph: I think he's talking about "plans" to split the Oracle JVM into free and premium (non-free) versions. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/11/07/0332252/Oracle-To-Monetize-Java-VM – Matt Ball Nov 16 '10 at 14:18
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    I don't think I'd worry too much about the rumor mill. They usually turn out to be false. – JOTN Nov 16 '10 at 14:21
  • @JOTN: But both Slashdot and The Register are reporting it! Oh yeah, see what you mean. – Tom Anderson Nov 16 '10 at 14:23
  • I'll be very happy to be surprised if Oracle takes another direction with Java. I do not want to start a discussion about vendors, so let me just say that I'd be glad to know options for this critical piece of software. – mahonya Nov 16 '10 at 15:04

4 Answers4

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IBM's JDK runs on Linux (it's tested on SuSE and Red Hat) on x86 and x86-64 processors. I don't believe it's restricted to IBM hardware; i don't think it has to be a Linux virtualized on a 390.

However, i have absolutely no idea whether support is available for it on non-IBM platforms. If you're planning to use it in production, you will probably need a support agreement of some sort, even if it's just to keep the suits happy.

Tom Anderson
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    Not speaking officially, but the general rule is support for IBM JVMs is provided in the context of the IBM Product purchased that includes the JVM (and might not be on an IBM platform - eg: WAS on windows). – Trent Gray-Donald Nov 16 '10 at 19:09
  • Thanks Tom, I must have landed on the wrong page on IBM website previously. This looks good. – mahonya Nov 18 '10 at 11:36
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If it is any help, I run OpenJDK in production now, it's been pretty stable. (I was originally running Sun JVM, but there is a long-overdue bug that was crashing my app, so I had to switch.)

Zlatko
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  • Thanks, could you give a little bit more detail about the nature of your production envrionment? Is it an app server? A web application? – mahonya Nov 16 '10 at 15:08
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    alfresco - document management system - repository application + frontend app. Works excellent on a 64-bit openjdk, no problems except the ones I create myself :) – Zlatko Nov 16 '10 at 15:26
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    Also, more on the details: - production is running on a quad-core proliant server, 6 gigs of RAM, ubuntu 10.04 linux, with the database on a separate server... – Zlatko Nov 16 '10 at 15:27
  • I'm using OpenJDK (6) in production for a http-based service monitoring tool. It uses some libs like jetty client, velocity, jcommander, guava, lombok, jackson, slf4j, janino, logback ... Just listing them to prove that they work very well with OpenJDK (at least their part actually used in the app). – gyorgyabraham Jan 10 '13 at 14:38
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You can download the IBM JVM off their website. The question is really around support and whether you have IBM products in your env (IBM JVM support comes bundled with another product).

The IBM JVM has enhancements that the Sun JVM doesn't have like 128bit encryption, and enhanced JavaEE features. Read this paper to get an understanding of their mods - http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/600cc5649e2871db852568150060213c/7d71c18820edabeb85256bfa00685e4b!OpenDocument

Albert T. Wong
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Try JRokit. It is expected to be the fastest one.

AlexR
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    Do you mean JRockit? Which is an Oracle product? Since the object is to find alternatives to Oracle, I don't think that's going to be any good. – JeremyP Nov 16 '10 at 15:25