jpabloae.blog

Currently Openbravo ERP 2.50 officially supports PostgreSQL 8.3 and Sun JDK 6. By the time when these versions were taken as our base, PostgreSQL 8.4 did not exist and OpenJDK 6 was an on-going project still not ready. One year later the situation is quite different:

• PostgreSQL 8.4.1 is the latest and greatest of the PostgreSQL releases.
• OpenJDK 6 is completed and a very real alternative to Sun’s JDK.

For those unfamiliar with OpenJDK, here’s a bit of history: on 2006 Sun decided to open their JDK and license it under the GPL. Some work was required for that, though: about 4% of the code was proprietary, dependent on 3rd parties who didn’t want to open those components. So the OpenJDK project started rewriting those parts and getting the rest ready. Now OpenJDK 6 has passed the Technology Compatibility Kit tests and claims to be a fully compatible Java 6 implementation.

Using OpenJDK will allow us to have a 100% open source and free software stack. Also,  as most modern Linux distributions include it as the default JDK, setting up Openbravo ERP will be easier. For example Ubuntu ships OpenJDK as the default one and in the next 10.04 LTS Sun’s JDK will be available in the multiverse repository or in none at all.

On the other hand supporting PostgreSQL 8.4 has the obvious benefits of enjoying the improvements of this new major version.

So let’s play a bit with them to see how they behave with our latest release, Openbravo ERP 2.50MP8.

PostgreSQL 8.4

I’ve run two tests using version 8.4.1:

• Full build of Openbravo ERP 2.50MP8 (ant install.source): no surprises, our code builds cleanly with this new major version. The build times are similar compared to PostgreSQL 8.3.8.
• Functional test (smoke test): this is usually a bit more tricky. But good news! No problems at all, it passes all the smoke test cleanly! Nice.

OpenJDK 6

Now the hard part. Let’s see how it goes:

• Full build of Openbravo ERP 2.50MP8 (ant install.source): ouch, it fails the first time when it minifies the JavaScript files using YUI Compressor. But no worries, it’s a known issue that has a simple workaround, acceptable for now. After deleting the conflictive file the build finishes successfully. So the first big test passed, this looks promising.
• Functional test (smoke test): so I set up Tomcat to run with OpenJDK, start the smoke tests on Openbravo ERP 2.50MP8 and 100% successfully completed! Yes, all of them.

Honestly, I’m quite impressed. I expected PostgreSQL 8.4 to work well, but I didn’t have as much faith on OpenJDK as my fellow Sree had. Congratulations to the OpenJDK team, you’ve done a great job.

Continuous Integration

You want proofs of all this? We’ve set up continuous builds and functional tests of our bleeding edge ERP code. Have a look at the experimental jobs in our build farm. This will help us detecting mismatches between our current stack and the new candidates.

The full builds will be run every 3 days and the smoke tests once per week. You can also check the trend and health of these builds.

Conclusions

My initial conclusions are clearly positive: the core of Openbravo ERP works well with PostgreSQL 8.4 and OpenJDK 6. It’s too early to say when we will officially support them, but this is an important milestone. The continuous builds and tests, as well as some manual QA and developer work will help us on taking the decision.