IBM launched the Open Liberty project this week to take its Liberty to a next level by moving the essential Liberty code base into open. IBM’s ongoing development for WebSphere will be based on this project, and the availability of this code is in GitHub under the Eclipse Public License V1.
IBM had created Liberty five years ago, to help developers turn ideas into production-ready apps more quickly and easily using agile and DevOps principles. The Liberty was extremely successful in WebSphere transformation, that is the reason IBM is putting more efforts in enhancing this service with the launch of Open Liberty.
The focus of Open Liberty is on creating a runtime supporting Java microservices that can be updated frequently and moved between different cloud environments.
Developers get core components for building Java apps and microservices using Open Liberty, and they can move up to the commercial versions of WebSphere liberty. It adds dedicated technical support and more advanced capabilities.
“We hope Open Liberty will help more developers turn their ideas into full-fledged, enterprise ready apps. We also hope it will broaden the WebSphere family to include more ideas and innovations to benefit the broader Java community of developers at organizations big and small.” – Ian Robinson, WebSphere Foundation chief architect at IBM.
Open liberty is powered with robust Java EE foundation from WebSphere Liberty and latest technologies from MicroProfile community. Developers don’t need to modify their applications when moving from WebSphere Liberty to Open Liberty, because these both are built on the same codebase.
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Along with creating Open Liberty, IBM has also contributed its J9 VM to Eclipse as Eclipse OpenJ9. The combination of Open Liberty and OpenJ9 can offer full Java stack from IBM with a fully open licensing model.
IBM has also collaborated in creation of Istio project, along with Google and Lyft, that helps creating an open service fabric for simplifying integration and management of microservices.
