Sharat Chander‘s blog post Official Docker Image for Oracle Java and the OpenJDK Roadmap for Containers provides a high-level overview of the “Official Docker Image for Oracle Java,” an introduction to Docker and why containers like Docker are desirable, and a peek at things to come for Java on Docker. The post also provides a link to the “Docker image for Oracle Server JRE” that “is now available on Docker Store.”
Chander briefly discusses attempts to set “up a consistent, reproducible environment that scales to thousands/millions of instances” for the cloud and how operating system tools and hardware virtualization have been used in this way. He then introduces Docker as another approach and provides a brief description of the benefits of Docker.
Chander’s post introduces Alpine Linux and quotes their web page, “Small. Simple. Secure. Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.” Chander associates Alpine Linux’s use of musl libc (described as “a new general-purpose implementation of the C library” that “is lightweight, fast, simple, free and aims to be correct in the sense of standards-conformance and safety”) and busybox (combination of “tiny versions of many common UNIX utilities into a single small executable”) to Java and paraphrases the message list post announcing Project Portola: “The goal of OpenJDK ‘Project Portola’ is to provide a port of the JDK to Alpine Linux, and in-particular the ‘musl’ C library.”
The FAQ section of Chander’s post has some interesting questions and answers. For example, there is information on Oracle’s “recommendations for running Oracle Java SE on Docker” available on GitHub. There is information on Java 8 Update 131 enhancements that enable “better memory and processor integration between Java and Docker” and it’s interesting to note that in “JDK 9 the JVM will be container-aware” instead of “the thread and memory settings [coming] from the host OS.”
The OpenJDK Docker Repository is available at https://hub.docker.com/_/openjdk/.
It’s interesting to see what is being done and what’s planned for using Java with Docker.
| Reference: | Java and Docker: Now and the Future from our JCG partner Dustin Marx at the Inspired by Actual Events blog. |
