BellSoft: SoftChalk chooses Liberica JDK to create a reliable and secure educational platform based on OpenJDK

By leveraging Liberica JDK, SoftChalk receives Apple notarization for its Java 8 client and gets macOS release planning back on track.

SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–BellSoft, OpenJDK distribution vendor and one of the top-5 OpenJDK contributors, today announced that SoftChalk, provider of content authoring software, has adopted Liberica JDK. With this product, the company will be able to create a fully secure foundation for its educational platform based on OpenJDK and reach macOS Catalina users.

SoftChalk is the leading provider of content authoring software for educators in K12 school districts, colleges and universities. For the past 15 years, educators in more than 1500 educational institutions have used SoftChalk to develop interactive and engaging online lessons for their students.

The company’s Mac Java client is based on Java 8. Its weaker libraries left them unable to pass Apple notarization and keep releasing their product for the growing portion of customers on macOS Catalina. Therefore, SoftChalk had to defer multiple releases in a row. They needed an OpenJDK distribution that would support Java 8 and hold Apple notarization. Otherwise, they would have to go through a painful update of the whole JDK to a compliant version. The process would further postpone the release schedule and put the business on hold.

SoftChalk adopted Liberica JDK distribution because it integrated with their legacy product line seamlessly and included long-term support with timely security fixes. One of the core decisive factors was that Liberica JDK was scanned for malicious components and code-signing issues and got notarized by Apple on time. This way, SoftChalk received a fully compliant Java 8 foundation for their product and were back on track with the release planning even sooner than they expected.

“The foundation’s reliability, control of all vulnerable points and a quick resolution of problems by high-level professionals are the only things that allow companies and their customers to be safe. That is why we are happy that such a large platform as SoftChalk is now based on Liberica JDK. Indeed, today, as never before, stability and safety are important to us. We want to be the ones who make the online world more reliable than offline,” explains Alexandr Belokrylov.

“Inability to get our Java 8 client certified by Apple was a show-stopper, as we were unable to deliver our product to the growing portion of users on macOS Catalina. BellSoft’s quick response and ability to receive Apple notarization helped us release much sooner than we thought we could. We were impressed with the support BellSoft offers and we could not find another distribution that would integrate so painlessly with our product line as Liberica JDK,” says Chuck Woods, Manager, Engineering and Operations at SoftChalk.

About Bellsoft

BellSoft releases and supports Liberica JDK, an OpenJDK binary distribution verified by TCK for Java SE Standard Compliance. BellSoft engineers have been contributing to the OpenJDK project since its inception. Being one of the top-5 OpenJDK contributors, BellSoft drives a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and compact containers with Liberica JDK targets microservice solutions on. Using popular as well as in-house performance optimization techniques and tools allows BellSoft to work on performance tuning for industry leaders.

Website: www.bell-sw.com

About SoftChalk

SoftChalk offers content authoring and hosting solutions that are critical to the success of eLearning initiatives, providing educators with easy, fast, affordable ways to create, manage and share rich, interactive content that engages students in the learning process and inspires learning. Lesson content is web-based and can be delivered in almost any learning management system, content management system, on a web-server, on mobile devices or in the cloud — anywhere for just-in-time learning.

Website: https://softchalk.com/

Contacts

Media contact
Valerie Kuzmina, PR Manager

Phone: +1-669-279-2279

valerie.kuzmina@bell-sw.com