Java JDK 1.7 on Mac 1.8.2

I've been doing Scala and Groovy at the day job for about a year now.  For some side work I thought I'd use Java, there obviously aren't enough semi-colons in my life.  I haven't touched 1.7 yet and setting it up on my Mac wasn't incredibly intuitive.

I had to do more poking around to arrive at this than I wish I had to.

Finding the actual download from Oracle is easy.

After installing Java 1.7 from Oracle I added this to my ~/.bashrc to actually use it.  Not sure if the install should've done this or if I missed some steps I was supposed to take.


export JRE_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_10.jdk/Contents/Home/
export JAVA_HOME=$JRE_HOME
export JDK_HOME=$JRE_HOME
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

And holy cow Oracle does not make it easy to find out how to download the JDK 1.7 API documentation.  Got to have it local for coding on an airplane.

Central Acadiana JVM User Group

I am attempting to set up a JVM user group here in Lafayette, LA.  Central Acadiana JVM User Group will hold it's first meeting this upcoming Monday at Buffalo Wild Wings in Lafayette, LA.

I come from Denver where the JVM is very popular.  Most of the work I have done and the people I have talked to in Denver are doing it right; in a more light-weight way.  I imagine most parts of the country are doing JVM work are using heavy application servers from Oracle or IBM.  I haven't done that since 2004.  Anything I've done since then that needs to go over HTTP runs inside Tomcat.  

I think Java is big in Denver because of the telecommunications background.  People worked with C and Unix.  A transition to Java made more sense than .NET.

In Lafayette, as far as I can tell .NET is big for enterprise development.  There is a lot of embedded development going on and that of course is down in C.  There's also some LAMP and ColdFusion.

So yeah, I'll let you know how it goes.  As you can tell from the icon I chose for the meetup, I don't expect a lot of people to join in.  If another human shows up interested in the JVM I'll change the icon to something other than the forever alone guy.

Podcasts

Here are the podcasts I follow these days.

• Java Posse
• The Scala Types
• The Groovy & Grails Podcast
• Career Tools
• Chariot TechCast
• Chariot Developer News