Azul Systems (Azul), a provider of Java runtime solutions, has announced early access to Zulu, the company’s build of OpenJDK, supporting the Java 9 SE platform. Zulu is an enterprise-grade, certified build of OpenJDK that can be deployed across various operating systems, containers, hypervisors and cloud platforms.
Zulu 9 is open source, freely distributable, incorporates all the planned features of Java 9 and supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms. Azul will provide regular updates to pre-release versions of Zulu 9 based on the development cadence of the OpenJDK Java 9 project. Pre-release builds of Zulu 9 are available now from the Zulu Community
website.
Zulu is designed to perform like Oracle HotSpot and is compliant with the Java SE standards for Java 8, 7, or 6. Azul offers free Zulu extensions to ensure runtime compatibility with HotSpot.
Java 9 is a major release which includes initial implementation of project Jigsaw, a new modular architecture which allows developers to pick and choose exactly the features they need for deployments to more effectively scale down to small devices, and also provides a more efficient run-time format for stored class and resource files than the legacy jar format.
Additional features include faster graphics performance via the Marlin renderer, a new HTTP client API, a new command line tool and API called JShell, and improved keystore security. General availability of Java 9 is currently scheduled for September, 2016.