The real beauty of OpenJDK is its open nature, which means that developers can not only use it to run an application, but also change it to their needs or contribute to its development. The availability of the source code and ease of access to it opens huge opportunities to individuals who have special requirements, or just want to learn more about the way JVM works internally and want to adapt it for any special requirements. This chapter will help you to get into it and provide some recipes to make the process of setting up the required development environment as easy as possible.

At first, it will cover how to set up the development environment and which tools are required to get started. It will cover the IDE setup, and some tweaks required to launch JVM and start debugging. The next step is to make changes and rebuild the code, and the latter is going to be slightly different from the normal build described in Chapter 5, Building IcedTea, Chapter 6, Building IcedTea with...