2022 was a turbulent year, but it’s over, so people all over the world are taking a break and contemplating what they managed to accomplish. For us at BellSoft, this was a year of growth, testing new waters, and, as always, trying to do the things we do better. Please allow us to share some of the victories we were able to win:
Liberica JDK keeps improving
Liberica JDK maintains its status as one of the leading OpenJDK distributions of 2022 thanks to its many features, great support, and availability on the largest number of platforms. Its rising popularity led to the notable increase of downloads by 70%.
As a result of the trust our partners put into Liberica JDK, BellSoft’s revenue grew by 92%.
Liberica NIK received critical updates
For Liberica Native Image Kit, there was a next major version released (Liberica NIK 22), and all the available versions were provided with builds based on JDK 11 and JDK 17. The popularity of Liberica NIK led to a 1,800% increase in the number of downloads.
BellSoft’s products are recommended for Spring Framework
Our collaboration with VMware is going strong. Liberica JDK became an OpenJDK distribution recommended by the Spring Framework team.
Now that Spring Boot 3 received a baked-in support for GraalVM Native Image, superseding the Spring Native project, Liberica NIK continues to be a recommended Native Build Tool.
New line of products is released
2022 became a year when we presented a new operating system and the whole Platform based on it for creating performant lightweight containers!
- Alpaquita Linux is the tiny performant OS built for containers and optimized for Java applications. By itself, it is a modern Linux full of features and with both glibc and musl builds available. Together with our other software, it becomes something more — Alpaquita Cloud Native Platform!
- Alpaquita Cloud Native Platform is a set of fundamental technologies for containerized Java services execution. With it, we were able to make our tiny JDK container images even smaller, more secure, and more performant. And thus, with Alpaquita images, we managed to make our set of containers even more complete.
Contribution
In 2022, we continued to participate in the work of the OpenJDK community.
OpenJDK
We stayed among the top companies contributing to OpenJDK mainline and LTS update releases. Our engineers made notable enhancements for the OpenJDK project, including multiple improvements to code density and cryptography. BellSoft maintained its status among the leading OpenJDK contributors with the release of JDK 18 and JDK 19.
Our CTO, Aleksei Voitylov, was re-elected as a member of the JCP Executive.
GraalVM
This year, we achieved something new by doing more work in the GraalVM community. We started implementing the parallel garbage collector (in progress). This is important because currently there is an issue of resources not being used efficiently by runtime inside the native images with their single thread stop-the-world mechanism utilized. Garbage collector inside these native images is very useful, but it takes time to finish, and during that time the application is paused. Our tests show that with the parallel garbage collector we can raise throughput and radically decrease the GC pause, thus making the latency much lower.
JDK 6 & 7
2022 was the year when Oracle ended the extended support for JDK 7, and JDK 6 exists without Oracle’s support since 2018. And yet both of these Java versions are utilized by many enterprises all over the world as they have multiple reasons for steering clear of upgrading.
BellSoft is the company that provides support for JDK 6 and 7 and will keep doing so at least up to 2026. With quarterly security updates, cryptography maintenance, updates to IANA timezone data and root certificates, and fixes for functional regression and other issues, we make Liberica 6 & Liberica 7 secure and reliable. Our runtime is compatible with multiple virtual environments and 32 and 64-bit operating systems.
Conclusion
During the past year, we worked to fulfill our vision of making Java the number one technology for modern enterprises, and we will continue doing so with passion! We promised to continue providing high-quality support and creating innovative tools, and this year proved we can deliver this and much more!
Of course, all of this was made possible by you, our customers, partners, OpenJDK community, Java developers, students, and enthusiasts. As always, we are ready to help and support you, so, please, contact us with any questions or concerns. Let’s keep making Java better together as a community!
