SCIENCE

Oracle and IBM has announced that the companies will collaborate to allow developers and customers to build and innovate based on existing Java investments and the OpenJDK reference implementation. Specifically, the companies will collaborate in the OpenJDK community to develop the leading open source Java environment.

With today's news, the two companies will make the OpenJDK community the primary location for open source Java SE development. The Java Community Process (JCP) will continue to be the primary standards body for Java specification work and both companies will work to continue to enhance the JCP.

The collaboration will center on the OpenJDK project, the open source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) specification, the Java Language, the Java Development Kit (JDK), and Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

Oracle and IBM will support the recently announced OpenJDK development roadmap, which accelerates the availability of Java SE across the open source community.

"The Java community is vital to the evolution of the Java platform," said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president, Oracle. "The collaboration between Oracle and IBM builds on the success of OpenJDK as the primary development platform for Java SE."

"IBM, Oracle and other members of the Java community working collaboratively in OpenJDK will accelerate the innovation in the Java platform," said Rod Smith, vice president, emerging technologies, IBM. "Oracle and IBM's collaboration also signals to enterprise customers that they can continue to rely on the Java community to deliver more open, flexible and innovative new technologies to help grow their business."

Java is a general-purpose software development platform that is specifically designed to be open and enable application developers to "write once, run anywhere." The platform is most widely used in business software, web and mobile applications.