Azul Systems, an award-winning developer of run-time platforms for Java applications, has recently announced their new initiative that aims to support the open source community. This new project gives developers free access to the company’s Zing JVM for the development and testing of their open source applications.

The writeup “Azul Offers Free Zing JVM to Open Source Community Projects” quotes Michael McCandless, an Apache Lucene committer who explains how the free use of Zing JVM has already helped Lucene developers:

Azul’s innovative Zing JVM and pauseless GC now enable Apache Lucene project developers to explore use cases requiring large heaps, such as holding an entire search index in memory for faster searching. Initial in-memory tests on the full Wikipedia English-language site index show Zing is truly pauseless while managing a heap in excess of 140 GB.

According to the company, Zing 5.0 is the only JVM that can support extremely high memory allocation rates. In fact, it can support application instances greater than 512 GB without any Garbage Collection (GC) pauses.

The company’s decision to give free access to their Zing JVM got a positive reception from many well-known open source committers. Apart from Michael McCandless, Clojure developer Rich Hickey called the project a “fantastic contribution.” Other supporters include Scala creator Martin Odersky and JRuby project co-head Charles Nutter.

But apart from Azul, there are other companies out there that spearhead projects to support the open source community. One of them is LucidWorks, which is one of the pillars of enterprise search and analytics. Their upcoming SearchHub.org project will make available technical content that is geared towards the education of Lucene/Solr developers. It will also be a venue where open source search developers can exchange ideas and communicate with each other.

Lauren Llamanzares, September 14, 2012

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