Azul Versions

[Fairy Dawdy]

AzulPortuguese for blue) is an abstract strategy board game designed by Michael Kiesling and released by Plan B Games in 2017. Based on Portuguese tiles called azulejos, in Azul players collect sets of similarly colored tiles which they place on their player board. When a row is filled, one of the tiles is moved into a square pattern on the right side of the player board, where it garners points depending on where it is placed in relation to other tiles on the board.

From two to four players collect tiles to fill up a 5x5 squares player board.[2] Players collect tiles by taking all the tiles of one colour from a repository, or from the centre of the table, and placing them in a row, taking turns until all the tiles for that round are taken.[3] At that point, one tile from every filled row moves over to each player's 5x5 board, while the rest of the tiles in the filled row are discarded.[4] Each tile scores based on where it is placed in relation to other tiles on the board.[5] Rounds continue until at least one player has made a row of tiles all the way across their 5x5 board. Additional points are awarded at the end of the game for each complete row or column, and for each instance of all five tiles of the same colour being collected.

Keith Law, writing for Paste Magazine, said "The theme doesn't really tie into or matter for the game play, but the artwork is just fantastic and...will give Azul a ton of shelf appeal in a market where maybe publishers don't pay as much attention to that aspect of marketing."[2]

Nate Anderson of Ars Technica described it as "an ideal weeknight game, or a game night opener, or a family title."[7] Wirecutter described it as having "slightly tricky rules" but is "easy to play" with "beautiful art".[8]

In late 2018, Plan B Games has released a second title in the Azul line, Azul: Stained Glass of Sintra, which utilised the same tile-drafting mechanism, and required players to match vertical patterns on two sided stained-glass window panes on the player boards. A movement pawn was added which placed additional restrictions on which pane a player could fill on any given turn, adding to the game's complexity.[19]

A third game in the series, Azul: Summer Pavilion, was released in late 2019. It again utilised the same tile-drafting mechanism but introduced a wild colour which changed from round to round, and saw players collecting diamond-shaped tiles to create star patterns.[20] Leah Williams from Kotaku complimented the components, strategy, accessibility, and engagement, but critiqued the scalability for party settings.[21]

But I have to now migrate from Oracle Java to Azul Zulu Open SDK. Are there any known issues with the above dependencies with Azul Open SDK. I tried looking for the same but could not find any information on this. How do I analyse if there could be any regression issues due to this migration.

Since the Oracle JDK is built from OpenJDK just as Zulu is, there will be no functional differences that would affect an application. Both are also TCK tested, ensuring that the builds conform to the Java SE specification.

The thing is that most Java vendors are working from the same OpenJDK codebase, and running the same standard regression testsuite. While some vendors will be tracking a little behind the OpenJDK patches, I wouldn't expect much of a delay, especially for important changes and fixes. And everyone is trying to not break people's Java application code ... because it causes reputational damage for the Java vendors.

If we exclude clearly advertised vendor differences / differentiation, you are (IMO) more likely to run into differences between different OpenJDK Java versions and updates, than you are between matching versions / updates provided by different Java vendors.

For example, I see that in "1.8.0_291" they have disabled TLS 1.0 and 1.1 ... which might require remediation if your application still needed to support these (insecure) versions of SSL / TLS for legacy reasons.

... you are more likely to run into problems from the "_202" to "_241" changes than from the Oracle Java to Azul Java change. If you are really concerned by the possibility of regressions, I would recommend treating this as two separate migrations. And then try to keep up with the patches. You shouldn't have allowed yourself to get 27 months behind on updates, especially since one of the intermediate patch releases ("_231") contains a batch of security fixes.

For historical reasons, Azul Zulu releases use different versioning schemes for different major versions.For Azul Zulu 8 and earlier, the version consists of 4 numbers: XX.YY.0.BB, the third number is always "0".For Azul Zulu 11 and later, the version consists of 3 numbers: XX.YY.BB.

However, since 2019, moves from Java Development Kit vendor Oracle to impose multiple license changes on new versions are causing organisations to pay attention to Java. Many businesses in APAC are jumping ship in favour of OpenJDK options like Azul Systems.

Gil Tene, chief technology officer at Azul, whose Java offering supports organisations like Netflix, Mastercard, Salesforce, Workday and Adobe, said its Java management options are also helping customers optimise cloud costs and efficiently de-risk Java vulnerabilities.

With the update in 2019, starting from Oracle JDK 8, Oracle sought to get those using Oracle Java in commercial production to purchase an Oracle Java SE subscription. In 2021, a backlash caused it to reverse course, and commercial production was allowed from Oracle JDK 17.

The 2021 changes only included updates for Long Term Support versions of Java for at least one full year after the release of the next LTS version, shorter than competing OpenJDK vendors. The new licence conditions also did not allow redistribution for a fee.

In 2023, Oracle announced it would require organisations using Oracle Java to purchase a license for their entire employee population if even a single employee or server had installed a licensable version of Java.

Because the pricing change did not depend on the actual number of Java users and even captured the likes of contractors working for an organisation, the change entailed significant increases in costs for companies choosing to continue with Oracle Java.

Stepping in to pick up Java users was Amazon, whose Coretto increased to 31% of the market in 2023, though this had dropped to 18% again by 2024. A range of other vendors, such as community maintained Eclipse Adoptium and Azul Systems, have been capturing interest too.

Security, compliance and governance are another key driver of paying more attention to Java. With the risk of common vulnerabilities and exposures in older versions of Java and recent events like the Log4Shell vulnerability that impacted 80% of Java users, organisations want to ensure they practise good hygiene by updating to more recent versions of Java, according to Azul.

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Is there any potential issues if we install the AEM using Azul Zulu OpenJDK 11 instead of Oracle JDK (Most of the time we used Oracle JDK but Amazon E2 server already installed the Azul Zulu OpenJDK 11.

Azul Zulu OpenJDK LTS versions are supported for on-premises AEM deployments starting with version 6.5 SP9. Support and distribution of the Azul Zulu JDK LTS versions must be licensed directly from Azul by Adobe customers.

@varaande Did you find the suggestions from users helpful? Please let us know if more information is required. Otherwise, please mark the answer as correct for posterity. If you have found out solution yourself, please share it with the community.

Currently (for Oracle Java), we create a new product in the catalog for every major Java release (11, 14, 15, etc.), and only allow our updates to update existing versions of java that are of the same major release. We believe this is counter to the intentions of these latest releases of Java and are proposing the following (only for Zulu OpenJDK at this time).

If this product is selected and deployed, the latest JDK version available will be deployed, this product will upgrade all versions of Azul OpenJDK on applicable devices to the latest available.

Switching to this method will allow our customers to choose if they want to patch OpenJDK to the latest available, or stay on a supported LTS release. As new LTS releases come out, Patch My PC will add them as new products and provide update definitions until that LTS release hits end-of-life.

1 major drawback to this new method is that deployments for this new methodology is that if both "Zulu JDK Latest" and any of the Zulu JDK LTS releases are selected as a product in Patch My PC, there is a chance of 2 updates being applicable on a single device (say if Zulu JDK Latest and Zulu JDK 8 are both selected and deployed to a device with an old version of Zulu JDK 8, that device will get both updates as applicable and the version that the device will end up with is Zulu JDK Latest).

Customers will be able to update to the latest version of Java without an application deployment (Zulu JDK Latest will update any version to the latest, so app deployments to update between major versions are unnecessary)

Patch My PC will not need to create a new product for every new release of Java every 6 months (Adding a new product node to the catalog is more time consuming than adding a new update for the same product)

If you've made it this far, thank you for reading! Please help us improve the product by providing any feedback on this methodology, and let us know if there is anything we can improve here or if there are flaws in our logic!

I just wanted to let you all know we haven't forgotten about this request. We are working through some others at the moment that more unique customers are following. If any others come across this idea, please vote it up if it's one you would like to see added.

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