In 2019, Oracle changed the licensing terms for their distribution of Java. For reasons of consistency, convenience and good will, BridgePoint had been packaged with this version of Java. Oracle’s new licensing now makes this impossible. The xtUML development team has extricated the bundled JRE and will stop distributing a Java runtime with BridgePoint.
BridgePoint v6.19 and higher no longer include a pre-packaged JRE within the installation zipfile for Linux and Windows. The macOS version of BridgePoint has never included a JRE.
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Note
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Throughout this document use of the term "JRE" indicates any Java runtime engine distribution. The actual Java runtime installed on your system may be either a runtime-only version of Java or a Java Development Kit (JDK) version. |
This note describes how to configure your BridgePoint to use a JRE of your choice.
BridgePoint 7 requires Java 11. It does not run with Java 8.
BridgePoint 6 requires Java 8. It does not run with Java 11. If you attempt to run BridgePoint 6 with a Java 11 JRE, you will get an error during launch like this:
The changes to the Oracle licensing and distribution can be a bit confusing. We recommend researching how this change will affect your use of Java. We found this article to be helpful.
The choice of "Which Java to use?" is not so simple and is now one that users and system administrators must actively make. There are many choices available. This article gives an overview of quite a few of choices. The BridgePoint team has had success running BridgePoint with the Java 8 and 11 distributions from AdoptOpenJDK.
Linux and macOS users need to be aware that most of the default Java installs provided by package managers (such as apt and homebrew) are now installing Java 11 and newer. For BridgePoint 6 you must take the necessary steps to install Java 8. For BridgePoint 7 you must take the necessary steps to install Java 11. Both versions may exist on a system at the same time.
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Tip
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For BridgePoint 6 on ubuntu 18.04, we installed OpenJDK 8 JDK with: sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk
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Once you have a Java JDK installed, make sure you set the JAVA_HOME environment variable for your shell.
The next section explains how to configure BridgePoint to use the proper Java runtime.
After you have installed your choice of Java onto your system, the next step is to configure BridgePoint to use it.
To avoid ambiguity, especially if your system includes both a Java 8 and Java 11 JRE, we recommend configuring BridgePoint explicitly to use a version of Java you specify.
This is done by setting the "-vm" argument in the bridgepoint.ini file under
the installation folder. Here are some examples:
Simply edit the bridgepoint.ini file with your choice of text editor and point
to the desired Java executable. Remember, BridgePoint 6 requires Java 8;
BridgePoint 7 requires Java 11.
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Tip
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On Windows we do want to use 'javaw' as shown in the screenshot to avoid the creation of a command prompt window for the java launch. |
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