Proposal: Modernizing the OpenJDK.org Website Design & User Experience

[Magnus Ihse Bursie]

On 2025-03-19 20:17, Suren Konathala wrote:

> Hi Magnus and Group,
>
> Following up on our discussion, I've created a draft of the website to 
> give you a better idea of my vision for the redesign.
> https://thesurenk.github.io/openjdk-website/
>
While it looks modern, I think it entirely misses the point of the 
audience. The openjdk.org site is not aimed at end users wanting to 
"Download" or "Learn" java. There are other sites for that, 
https://learn.java/ and sure, we could possibly link to those. Someone 
who stumbled to the site by mistake could certainly be helped with a 
simple instruction on the top of the page akin to this:

"This is the place to collaborate on an open-source implementation of 
the Java Platform, Standard Edition 
<https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/overview/index.html>, 
and related projects.

If you are looking for Java to run desktop applications: 
https://www.java.com/en/download/

If you are looking for Java developer resources: https://dev.java/"


But the rest of the site must be focused on the OpenJDK community. To 
me, the central parts are:

* The Developers guide

* The JEP index

* The mailing list index

* The wiki

---

* All the groups

* All the projects

--

* The census

* The Bylaws

* A collection of relevant links, e.g. to the organization's github 
page, the build readme, jtreg, etc.


Maybe some kind of news-feed would be nice to have as well, where 
information like upcoming workshops, recent releases, upcoming 
rampdowns, etc, could be posted. (This needs to be automated to work 
properly)


What I think is unfortunate with the current design is that all these 
important parts of the site is hidden in a sidebar (with an almost 
unreadably small font size). I'm wishing for a design that puts like the 
Developer's guide at a very prominent place, and having the groups and 
projects listed centrally in the page instead of hidden away. Perhaps an 
inline list of the most important and active project, with a short 
blurb, followed by a link to a page with "All projects", from where all 
projects could be reached. The "important"/active projects would then be 
like:

JDK
JDK Updates

Amber
Leyden
Loom
Panama
Valhalla

Skara

And then the groups should be presented, in a logical fashion. So the 
groups responsible for parts of the JDK source code should be presented 
separately, with a short blurb on what the group handles. Afaik, these are:

Build
Client Libraries
Compiler
Core Libraries
HotSpot
Internationalization
JMX
Networking
Security
Serviceability

The remaining groups are providing additional service to the OpenJDK 
community, and should be listed separately and perhaps not as prominent. 
These are:

Adoption
Compatibility & Specification Review
Conformance
Governing Board
IDE Tooling & Support
Members
Porters
Quality
Vulnerability
Web

/Magnus
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/web-discuss/attachments/20250321/d2b97d01/attachment-0001.htm>