Book Image

OpenJDK Cookbook

Book Image

OpenJDK Cookbook

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (20 chapters)
OpenJDK Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


IcedTea is a build and integration project for OpenJDK launched by Red Hat in June 2007. It allows users to build OpenJDK using free software tools. It also provides alternative open source implementations of the Java browser plugin and Java Web Start as part of the IcedTea-Web subproject.

Given the current state of the OpenJDK project itself, it is not easy to understand the full value of the IcedTea project. Some features of OpenJDK, which seem standard now, like the absence of binary components and an advanced build system, were pioneered in the IcedTea project.

The IcedTea project was started by Red Hat and the GNU classpath in 2007, soon after the Sun Java source code was published under an open source license. The main goal was to create a free Java package to include in GNU/Linux distributions. Popular distributions (such as Fedora or Arch) have strict requirements for included software. Generally speaking, the full source code must be available under the open source license...