PASTA

Amazon Corretto, the new OpenJDK 8 on the block

Mark Servilla

Nov 23, 2021 • 1 min read

The time has finally come to abandon Ubuntu's OpenJDK 8 LTS for a new maintainer - enter Amazon Corretto, a Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) drop-in replacement for Ubuntu's version of the LTS Java runtime and development kit that has since met its EOL in April 2021. Amazon Corretto is guaranteed to be supported until at least 2026. Installing Corretto 8 is simple - follow these instructions, which updated the Java alternative default to use Corretto:

❯ java -version
openjdk version "1.8.0_312"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment Corretto-8.312.07.1 (build 1.8.0_312-b07)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM Corretto-8.312.07.1 (build 25.312-b07, mixed mode)

In our project, we rely on Ubuntu's default Tomcat8 and Jetty9 servlet containers for managing both JSP and servlets in our current web framework. These two containers run the version of OpenJDK 8 specified in /etc/default/tomcat8 and /etc/default/jetty9, respectively. These are the only two configuration files that require modification for Corretto - change the JAVA_HOME variable from the Ubuntu OpenJDK8 to Corretto in both the tomcat8 and jetty9 files:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-amazon-corretto

And don't forget to clean out the webapps directory and recompile your code using Corretto 8.

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