JEP Visualiser

A little experiment to visualise the JDK releases and their constituent JEPs.

Live demo available at https://jep-visualiser.herokuapp.com/

What does it do?

It provides a visual timeline of the JEPs involved in each of the JDK releases.

It does this by scraping data from https://openjdk.java.net, transforming that data and using TimelineJs to build the timeline view.

How do I use it?

Visiting the web root / it will default to showing you the JEPs included in JDK 17. There's a drop-down/combo-box for selecting other JDK versions.

To see the JDK versions themselves (and when they were released) visit https://jep-visualiser.herokuapp.com/#jdks

To customise the JEPs included in the timeline just add them as a comma-separated list in the url. For instance, to see all the JEPs that have impact on Safety visit https://jep-visualiser.herokuapp.com/#193,266,338,371,383,385,393,389,396,403,412,414,416,417,419

How do i run it myself?

Easy, you just use the local run script:

./scripts/run-locally.sh

Or, you can build and run a Docker container:

docker build --tag jep-visualiser .
docker run -it -p 8000:8000 --name jep-visualiser jep-visualiser

You'll see a TON of output the first time you run that Docker container. The data collection/transformation only runs on the first container start so subsequent starts will be much quicker.

If you want to trigger the data to be recollected without re-running the contain you can just delete the file marker used to establish if the container has run before.

docker exec -it jep-visualiser /bin/sh
rm CONTAINER_STARTED

How do i build and run it as a Docker container?

docker build --tag jep-visualiser .
docker run -it -p 8000:8000 jep-visualiser

More details?

The local run script does a couple of things for you:

1. Creates a python virtual environment (with virtualenv)
2. Installs python dependencies (with pip)
3. Runs scrapy spiders to collect jdk and jep data
4. Transforms the jdk and jep data into a format TimelineJS can understand
5. Runs a simple HTTP server to serve TimelineJS visualisations