Eclipse Adoptium: 2022 in Review and 2023 Roadmap

Last year was a big one for Eclipse Adoptium, both the top-level project and in many of the sub-projects. 

Adoptium is a very large project, and that means there’s always a lot of work to be done just to keep things going. We run thousands of tests per release, and last year there were over 166 releases, a combination of platforms and versions. So that gives you some idea of how much underlying work has to get done just to keep things humming along. 

But there were some major milestones in Adoptium and its sub-projects that are worth highlighting. And it’s also worth looking ahead at 2023, which may well be an even bigger year than 2022. 

Reducing Technical Debt, Growth, and Creation of Adoptium Marketplace

At the beginning of the year, Adoptium had seven repositories and, as a result, a lot of technical debt. One of the big goals of 2022 was to bring that down. Over the course of the year, we managed to reduce that to four repositories, with the other three being archived. That was a major step forward in simplifying our repos and lowering the amount of tech debt in the project, which is always good. 

Last year was also a big one for the growth of Adoptium. Over the course of the year, we added:

• Four new working group members
• New sponsors (including Github sponsorship)
• Three new PMC members
• A new community manager
• New committers to many of Adoptium’s sub-projects
• Many new first-time contributors

Finally, in the second quarter of 2022 we launched the Adoptium Marketplace, a vendor-neutral space for Java runtimes, which was a major achievement. We already have seven vendors listing their products in the Marketplace, so a huge thanks to everyone who helped make that happen. 

Eclipse Temurin Takes Steps Towards Greater Security

One of the big achievements for Eclipse Temurin, one of our most active projects, was achieving level 2 SLSA compliance. Software supply chain security has become an increasingly high priority for the Eclipse Foundation, and achieving higher levels of SLSA compliance is an important part of that. 

Another major milestone for Temurin was the release of reproducible builds, a project led by Andrew Leonard. And there are a few distribution highlights worth mentioning as well, including:

• Code freezes during releases are no longer necessary
• Complete overhaul of the Linux installer pipeline
• Addition of some minimal UBI docker images

AQAvit Releases Enabled Launch of Marketplace

As we already mentioned, the launch of the Adoptium marketplace was a major achievement in 2022. But to launch that marketplace, significant work needed to take place as part of Eclipse AQAvit, our testing suite. 

That’s because to list a product in the marketplace, it has to pass the AQAvit verification. To ensure that everyone is testing against the same set of materials and producing outputs usable by anyone browsing the marketplace, some work needed to be done. Over the course of six official releases, we’ve gotten to the point where we can pin to specific versions and shells of upstream test material. 

We’ve also added some great features to AQAvit, such as:

• Support for nested iterations
• New information on tap files
• Microarchitecture support
• Added TKG parallelism in the GitHub action repository
• Jenkins auto-rerun
• Top-level results summary service (TRSS)
• New AQA test pipeline that gives flexibility on remote trigger
• New tests from Red Hat and Alibaba

Looking Ahead: 2023 Is All About Growth

A lot of work was accomplished in 2022, both in Adoptium itself and in its sub-projects. And 2023 looks like it will be just as exciting. 

The main goal for the Adoptium project in 2023 is growth. Even though all kinds of great things have been accomplished so far, and despite how large the Adoptium project is, it’s a fairly small team that’s been making it happen. Even though we have millions of downloads happening every week and there are thousands of people in our Slack, it’s a team of less than 100 people working on the project. 

Obviously, we want to continue making Eclipse Adoptium and its sub-projects even better in the future. To do that, it will be important for us to grow the community. There are a few main ways we’re tackling that. 

First, by directly doing community outreach, particularly in encouraging feedback. One of the main advantages of open source is that it can be very responsive: people say what features they want, and even if those people aren’t working on the project, those features get developed. For us, to make sure Adoptium continues developing tools that people actually need, we’ll be really encouraging the community to give us that feedback. In fact, in the last few months, we’ve had many new members in our Slack giving us great feedback on the tools they’re using at their companies.

Next is by encouraging more product usage. We know many people are using open source solutions, so why not use any of the Eclipse Adoptium technologies? If we can get people using a well-equipped Temurin binary, then they can start to get involved in other Adoptium projects by osmosis. 

Finally, we’re also looking for more collaboration opportunities with other Eclipse projects. It’s the same sort of idea: a lot of people use Java, and if you’re using Java, why not use one of our projects? That way, we can again get more feedback from more of the Eclipse community and grow the Adoptium community. We’re also hoping to leverage some of the skills of other segments of our community to improve some of our infrastructure, particularly by leveraging more automation with AQAvit. 

If you’d like to get more involved with Adoptium or any of its sub-projects, our website is a great resource.