Wow, they seem to be going out of their way to avoid mentioning any benefits I might get from using Zulu over OpenJDK or Oracle JDK for that matter.<p>Knowing Azul through Cliff Click's excellent blog posts I was expecting to see better GC, scalability work etc. but nope - this just seems to be rebranded JDK that is open source and has Enterprise support. Given Oracle they might have some success but that's about it.
Zulu is simple: It is a free and freely re-distributable binary distribution of OpenJDK for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Each binary is tested and certified (literally), which in the Java world is no small thing.<p>For MacOS and Windows, Zulu is the only binary distro of OpenJDK that I am aware of. For Linux (as of this writing), Zulu is the only publicly available binary distro of OpenJDK 8 that actually undergoes TCK testing and Java SE compatibility testing. [RedHat provides 7 and 6 binaries through the IcedTea project, but IcedTea has not yet shipped a Java 8 version].<p>So unless you want to build OpenJDK from source (and test top verify what you built is good), you'll need to get a binary from somewhere. Zulu is that somewhere.<p>To demonstrate the simple value of a tested and certified binary build: The current default Java binary thing you get on docker's official Java runtime image for Java 8 is 8u40 (<a href="https://registry.hub.docker.com/_/java/" rel="nofollow">https://registry.hub.docker.com/_/java/</a>). But 8u40 doesn't actually exist. It is still in development in OpneJDK and won't be released until March 2015. So this thing you pull off a repo is certainly not a tested or released version (likely a top of tree snapshot built from source and just pushed to an experimental repo).<p>For a current list of companies and organizations that are actually able to fully test OpenJDK 8 (or 7, or 6), see the TCK signatories list at: <a href="http://openjdk.java.net/groups/conformance/JckAccess/jck-access.html" rel="nofollow">http://openjdk.java.net/groups/conformance/JckAccess/jck-acc...</a><p><< And yes, I work for Azul. >>
I really can't get over the level of marketing here. "Report" after "report" from a company that specializes in generating favorable copywriting out of thin air (<a href="https://451research.com/about" rel="nofollow">https://451research.com/about</a>).<p>This is clearly not a product being targeted at developers, so I have no idea why "Open Source" or Docker is being pushed, other than being profitable buzzwords. In fact, on first impressions this looks like exactly what I would produce if I wanted to cheat clueless IT executives into buying a rebranded copy of OpenJDK.<p>If that's the goal, maybe it will work. If not, they badly need to rethink the site.
The obvious question is - does it provide anything additional on top of `OpenJDK` that I can already install via `apt-get install openjdk` ? I suppose those builds are 100% open source too.<p>I skimmed through 451's analyst report if Azul is bringing any of their own improvements to Zulu but answer seems negative.
A lot of companies would love use OpenJDK instead of OracleJDK or any other proprietary JDKs. This is wise move from azul to provide support for openJDK.
The only reason I use the Oracle jdk in my enterprise vs. OpenJDK is performance. Oracle goes out of their way to make it a pain in the ass to install their jdk. If Oracle's jdk were available via apt, this would be a no contest.<p>I'm curious if there's a performance improvement with Zulu and if there are apt repos available.