The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is a no-cost distribution of OpenJDK that's open source and available for free for anyone to deploy anywhere. It includes Long-Term Support (LTS) binaries for Java 11 and Java 17 on x64 server and desktop environments on macOS, Linux, and Windows, AArch64/ARM64 on Linux and Windows, binaries for macOS on Apple Silicon (AArch64/M1), and musl libc compiled binaries for Alpine Linux on x64.
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Oracle Java SE
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Oracle Java SE is a programming language and gives customers enterprise features that minimize the costs of deployment and maintenance of their Java-based IT environment.
Microsoft has contributed to the OpenJDK project and has also been able to develop support for the Mac M1 chipset. This is amazing that they've seen the importance of supporting all silicon in the spirit of Java. This is very commendable from the tech titan and we look forward to more improvements and enhancements.
Oracle Java SE is well suited to long-running applications (e.g. servers). Java Swing (UI toolkit) is now rather outdated, lacking support for modern UI features. JavaFX, the potential replacement for Swing, has now been separated out of Java core. Ideally, there would be a path to migrate a large application incrementally from Swing to JavaFX, but due to different threading models and other aspects, it is difficult. At this point, it is probably better to use an embedded web browser (e.g. JxBrowser) to provide a modern UI in HTML/Javascript and keep just the business logic in Java.
Since Java runs on a virtual machine, it's generally considered to be agnostic of the hardware it's running on. It allows for deployment across a mix of hardware setups with the same binary.
Lots of literature, third party libraries, support forums, and books have been devoted to Java in general, making it a great language to use to support the business.
Backwards compatibility has been an important strength of Java for us. Legacy code that isn't ready to be retired yet can still run on our newer setups despite using older versions of OJSE.
The language is fluent and has good support from a number of open source and commercial IDEs. Language features are added every 6 months, although long-term service releases are only available every 3 years. It would be nice if some of the older APIs were depreciated with more pressure to move to the new replacement APIs (e.g. File vs. Path), but transitions to new features are generally well implemented.
Java is such a mature product at this point that there is little support from the vendor that is needed. Various sources on the internet, and especially StackOverflow, provide a wealth of knowledge and advice. Areas that may benefit from support is when dealing with complex multithreading issues and security libraries.
Microsoft Build of OpenJDK stacks up against Oracle JDK (paid) very well. From both a performance, implementation, library support, and collaboration aspect.
We choose Java as our system has multiple sub-applications that have different purposes and architecture including back-end applications, front-end UI, front-end Rest API, and Selenium Automation tests. They are deployed in Windows and Linux, communicate with each other using Rest API, RMI and Queue Message and need to support different deployment environment from Dev, Test, UAT to Production so using Java allows us to have a common standard from development, build and deployment for all applications.
