Earlier this month we were thrilled to welcome the OpenJDK Community to GitHub. The communities migration effort, codenamed Project ‘Skara’, brought JDK 16 main-line development into GitHub. The JDK project is at the heart of the Java community and Java is one of the most popular languages for projects on GitHub. Therefore it’s a massive honor that we now get to help the team building the future of the Java language.
The ‘Skara’ project has been an impressive effort from the entire OpenJDK community led by the Java Platform Group at Oracle. Previously, they were relying on self-hosted Mercurial servers; this project involved bringing all of the development team and their tooling over to Git as well as moving the community to GitHub.
Like all big migrations, this was much more complex than just doing a hg-fast-export and then a git push. The team had to build custom CLI Tooling, bi-directional bridging with the OpenJDK mailing lists, integration with the OpenJDK bug tracking system. Some of the OpenJDK projects have also been busy adopting GitHub Actions for their CI builds. To do all this, the team created some fantastic integrations with the GitHub API as part of their Skara tooling. All of these integrations are now also open source and available in the OpenJDK GitHub organization.
OpenJDK joins a number of our most popular projects here on GitHub all written in Java, including Gradle, Maven, jUnit5, Elastic Search, Spring, Apache Spark, Ntify, Helidon and more. Now the OpenJDK projects can take advantage of some of the features we built Java developers on GitHub including free code scanning to look for security vulnerabilities, notifications and remediation of known security fixes as well as semantic code navigation in GitHub (which is powered by the Java based Elastic Search project).
Please join us in welcoming the OpenJDK community to GitHub. If you would like to contribute or get involved in the project, please visit https://openjdk.java.net/contribute/.