This Project maintains the OpenJDK Developers' Guide. The goal of this guide is to answer questions that the developers of the JDK might have around development process, tooling, standards, etc. The formal rules and processes are described in other documents, like JEP 1 for the JDK Enhancement-Proposal & Roadmap Process, or JEP 3 for the JDK Release Process. This guide is meant to be a complement with tutorials and examples for how to follow these rules and how to work together with the rest of the OpenJDK community.

There are many common use cases that aren't detailed in the formal process. This guide contains the defacto standard for how to work in such cases.

The target audience for this document is anyone in the OpenJDK community who aims to contribute to the development of OpenJDK. The nature of such a document is to target those who are not familiar with the process. People who are regular contributors would already know much of what this guide has to offer. Still, the Developers' Guide should work as a source of knowledge also for experienced contributors. This means that any descriptions in the Guide should be self-contained or have explicit references to any information the reader is expected to already know. The information should also be structured in such a way that it's easy to find details for any process, so that one who already knows the big picture can quickly find that particular detail that was forgotten.

To engage in the development of the Developers' Guide itself, create a private fork and join the dedicated guide-dev mail list.

The project comes with a makefile. Simply type make to generate html files from the source markdown. The build requires the tools pandoc, iconv, and perl and assumes a posix environment. The resulting html files in the build directory are exactly the files published on the OpenJDK web server. There is however a larger framework on the web server with fonts and CSS that is not part of this project. This means that the html files as they are generated will not look exactly the same as the final published version. Still they are hopefully good enough to proof read changes and see the layout in a browser.