Azul is the world’s only company focused solely on Java. As a Technical Writer at Azul since 2022, Frank Delporte writes about Azul products, keeps the documentation up-to-date, and blogs about the broader Java ecosystem. Topics include Zulu OpenJDK builds, Zing JVM, Falcon JIT compiler, Optimizer Hub, CRaC support, ReadyNow technology, and much more. Posts here often bridge the gap between product documentation and practical developer guidance.
Originally posted on the Pi4J website. Dieter Holz was experimenting with Pi4J V3 on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2. Because this version requires Java 21 or newer, he upgraded his OS to a newer Java version and found out that no Java code could be executed. He tried with Java 21 and 24, and neither worked correctly, although Java 17 runs without problems.
Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) is a JDK project, initiated by Azul. With CRaC, you can start Java programs with a shorter time to first transaction, combined with less time and resources to achieve full code speed. This is achieved by taking a snapshot (checkpoint) of a fully warmed-up Java process and launching one or more new JVMs from that snapshot.
When I spoke to developers at Devoxx in Belgium in October, I was surprised to learn how many of them are maintaining systems that are still running on Java 8 (released in 2014). One of them even still has a Java 5 application in production, with a runtime of 20 years old!
Last week I was working on a blog post about Azul Zulu with JavaFX support for ARM systems, like the Raspberry Pi. As you can see in this video, I found out my little test application with a lot of “bouncing balls” started losing performance on the Raspberry Pi with more than 1000 of those balls.
These are all the links of my presentation at BeJUG in Waregem, Monday, July 24, 2024.
At the Fosdem conference in Brussels on February 3rd, I gave a presentation about using an existing documentation set as the data for a ChatGPT-like application, created with JavaFX and LangChain4J. The video and links of that presentation are available here, and this post is a more detailed explanation of that application.
These are all the links of my presentation at the Fosdem Conference in Brussels, Saturday, February 3th, 2024, 17:40 CET.
These are all the links of my presentation at the JChampions Conference, Monday January 29, 2024, 16:00 CET.
On July 15th of 2023, I published a post here about my initial experiments with CRaC on the Raspberry Pi. At that time, I found out that both the Linux kernel in Raspberry Pi OS and the Zulu Build of OpenJDK still needed some changes to work on the Raspberry Pi. I created a ticket in the Linux kernel project, which was solved by Phil Elwell. Last week, a new version of the Raspberry Pi OS, based on Debian Bookworm, was released. And in september, version 21 of OpenJDK was released and the Zulu Build of it, includes CRaC. So let’s see if we can use CRaC without issues, if we bring all this togheter.
These are all the links of my presentation at Devoxx Belgium, Wednesday 12:00-12:50, Room 7.
With the April release of the Zulu Build of OpenJDK, Azul announced the integration of CRaC in its version 17 of Java for Linux. Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) is a feature introduced in OpenJDK to improve Java’s application startup and warmup times to milliseconds from seconds or even minutes, by allowing a running application to pause, snapshot its state, and restart later, even on a different machine.
Writing has always been my passion, and even in my previous jobs as a developer, I stood out as the one who enjoyed creating and maintaining documentation. But June 9th, 2023, marked my first birthday as a full-time technical writer at Azul. Yes, it’s already a year ago that I changed from being a developer-who-also-writes to a writer-who-also-develops. Let’s take a moment to reflect on my incredible journey over the past year.
On Foojay.io, Bazlur Rahman is publishing a series of interviews with various people from the OpenJDK community. I had the honor to be included in this series, and this is a repost.
For this post I did some experiments with Java 15, reusing the Ubuntu 64bit SD card which was also used for the earlier post “Comparing a REST H2 Spring versus Quarkus application on Raspberry Pi”.
In a previous post “Installing Java and JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi”, you can read how to install BellSoft LibericaJDK to be able to run JavaFX applications with a graphical user interface on a Raspberry Pi with ARMv7 or ARMv8 processor.