What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with OpenJDK, provides an overview of OpenJDK, explains what it is, and covers the basic steps required to have OpenJDK running and properly configured on the machine.

Chapter 2, Building OpenJDK 6, covers the steps required to build OpenJDK Version 6. This build is very different from OpenJDK 7 and OpenJDK 8 and requires more manual work to be done.

Chapter 3, Building OpenJDK 7, covers the steps required to build OpenJDK Version 7. Building OpenJDK 7 is an easier and more enjoyable process, compared to OpenJDK 6.

Chapter 4, Building OpenJDK 8, covers the steps required to build OpenJDK Version 8.

Chapter 5, Building IcedTea, teaches you how to build a set of tools that are developed apart from OpenJDK. These tools are replaced with some proprietary bits that are not available as open source, which include a browser plugin, Java WebStart, and so on.

Chapter 6, Building IcedTea with Other VM Implementations, covers some interesting VM projects, which also can benefit from the features provided by IcedTea, and how to build that product using these VMs and non-x86 CPUs.

Chapter 7, Working with WebStart and the Browser Plugin, will cover the configuration and installation of WebStart and browser plugin components, which are the biggest parts of the IcedTea project.

Chapter 8, Hacking OpenJDK, covers some bits which are required to start digging into the OpenJDK source code. Such things are the installation and setup of IDE, debugging, and updating HotSpot source code. There are also some useful examples of what the developer can do, for example, implementing your own intrinsic details.

Chapter 9, Testing OpenJDK, will go through an approach used in OpenJDK to test the source code and, since writing code is not enough, we need to write high quality product on which the code has to be tested. This chapter will also show you some examples to use the latest available tools.

Chapter 10, Contributing to OpenJDK, explains how OpenJDK is changing and evolving, how changes are executed, and what one needs to do to participate or to facilitate changes in OpenJDK. Some of these changes, if they are big enough, can take years to appear in the production version.

Chapter 11, Troubleshooting, teaches you about one of the most important parts of any project: bug fixing. It is important to understand which tools and processes are involved. In this chapter, we will cover some important steps, from submitting defects, to pushing the fix into the shared repository.

Chapter 12, Working with Future Technologies, covers some future developments in OpenJDK. As with any big project, OpenJDK has a roadmap with some exciting and promising projects for the next releases. That is exactly what this chapter is about. It lists all the steps required to download sources, build, and run some examples, where possible.

Chapter 13, Build Automation, provides some useful tips for automating the build process. It will be useful for those developers who make frequent changes in OpenJDK or always want to have the build with all the latest changes.