Celebrating 15 years of SAP's involvement in the OpenJDK - Mostly nerdlessMostly nerdless
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Almost exactly 15 years ago, on the 14th of July 2011, SAP became a member of the OpenJDK and one of its biggest contributors (source), helping to keep Java alive. To quote Ian Brown from the Java Platform Team at Netflix:
The superpower of #OpenJDK is that companies like #SAP can build what they need on top of the #JVM and then share those innovations back upstream for the benefit of the ecosystem. Congratulations to the #SAPMachine team on a decade and a half of advancing the state of the art in managed runtimes and being an awesome member of the community!
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The Early Days
But of course, SAP’s involvement in the Java community didn’t start there. Java became more and more important in the late 90ties, so SAP wanted to have a JVM tightly integrated with the SAP technology stack (including ABAP) and in 2000/2001 started participating in the Java Community Process (JCP), when it became a licensee of J2EE and J2SE, with Michael Bechauf becoming a representative in the executive committee in 2002 to guide the Java platform to become "the foundation for a next generation service composition platform that can rapidly deliver applications that support those business processes deemed most critical for a company." (source)
Java becoming a foundational technology for SAP was also facilitated by SAP’s 2000 acquisition of the Bulgarian company InQMy, which developed an application server (source). This became a foundational part of SAP’s NetWeaver application server. This product was released in 2004 (source). The Java application server initially ran on licensed Sun/Oracle JVM technology. SAP later developed SAPJVM, a SAP-maintained HotSpot-based JVM optimized for enterprise SAP workloads.
For SAP, it was an important decision when in 2001 we incorporated Java into our core products and made it an essential part of our technology platform SAP NetWeaver.
SAP Blogs
But this was still the time when Java was primarily developed by Sun, from which SAP licensed the Java source code for SAPJVM, with smaller contributions and bug fixes happening in private between the two companies. The team that later became the SapMachine team made many changes to make the JVM suitable for SAP’s use-cases: It ported HotSpot to many enterprise platforms, maintained SAP-specific fixes, optimized GC and memory behavior, supported AIX, PowerPC, s390, and other enterprise platforms, and made changes to integrate the JVM into SAP’s existing ecosystem. As well as starting development of the Eclipse-based SAPJVM-profiler, which is still endeared to its many users. Some would even argue it’s one of the best profilers out there…
SAP and the OpenJDK
Then, in December 2007, Sun started releasing the Java runtime as open-source under the GPL license (source). But the process was slow, so slow in fact that in 2009, a SAPJVM-related person wrote:
The Java industry is currently going through important changes, and there are many discussions around the openness of Java and the Java Community Process (JCP). To date, the JCP is heavily dominated by Sun Microsystems which was not always to the benefit of all parties interested in Java. Java is the lifeblood of the IT industry , and IT is a fundamental underpinning of the way business is conducted in the 21st century. The technical interfaces that are jointly developed by the community should be immune from bias, and the community should be able to work even closer together in the spirit of cooperation to continue the Java success story.
SAP Blogs
Then, after Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, IBM and Apple joined the OpenJDK project, helping broaden its governance beyond Sun/Oracle. SAP joined them in 2011, when Volker Simonis, the then lead of SAP’s JVM team, wrote the following mail to the OpenJDK mailing lists:
Dear all,
I’m really happy that as of today, SAP has signed the Oracle<br>Contributor Agreement (OCA). This means that with immediate effect the<br>SAP JVM developers can officially join the discussions on the various<br>OpenJDK mailing lists and contribute patches and enhancements to the<br>project.
SAP is a long time Sun and now Oracle Java source licensee who has<br>ported the original Sun (now Oracle) JDK to all the 14 SAP supported<br>platforms (including the Oracle supported Linux/Windows/Solaris<br>platforms plus Win/IA64, AS400/PPC64, HPUX/PARISC, HPUX/IA64,<br>Linux/IA64, Linux/PPC64, Linux/S390, AIX/PPC64).
I’m sure this move will be fruitful and beneficial for both, the<br>OpenJDK community as well as SAP.
Looking forward to working with you,<br>Volker Simonis and the whole SAP JVM team
SAP JOINs the OpenJDK
SAP’s Contributions
One of the biggest contributions, which is still ongoing, is the support of the OpenJDK on the PowerPC platform. This started in 2013 with JEP 175, with the stated motivation to:
Extend the platform coverage of the JDK source base to Linux/PowerPC64 and...