JRE & JDK now available to OS X developers (opens in new tab)

Note that the JRE installs to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin only, so it cannot easily be used by Java desktop applications and appears to be for applets only.

It also installs a System Preferences plugin that opens up a custom Swing-based settings panel that looks awful on a Retina MBP. It tries to replicate the look of the standard Apple Java Preferences app, but is confusing because it doesn't affect the system Java that you'd see when doing 'which java' from the command line.

The installer script then sets the permissions on /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/JavaAppletPlugin.plugin to root:wheel. This is the same as the bundled Java installations.

For those who want to know, here is what is inside the .pkg files within the DMG. If you want to have a custom install directory in a non OSX specific directory structure then you can extract the packages and it should work appropriately.

JDK: https://gist.github.com/3353638

JRE: https://gist.github.com/3353662

I'm not sure what is the news here, I've been using OS X for five months and one of the first things I did was to get JDK from Oracle. I understand that Apple has stopped distributing it and Oracle will be the standard source to get JRE and JDK but I don't get how it was unavailable before this press release. Am I missing something? Otherwise title is misleading.

Buried in this press release is support for ARM (and the Raspberry Pi)

So speaking just in terms of the JRE, is there any reason to download it from Oracle instead of Apple? A separate Oracle updating program is a much less elegant solution than the current Software Updates integration that Apple uses.

Apple's already removed their own JRE from default OS X installs, demand-loading it only with explicit user authorization.

Furthermore they've sent out recent security updates partially disabling applet loading in web browsers and disabling the JVM entirely if it hasn't been used in a long while.

I think that the next step of completely shuttering Apple's JRE demand-loader will be a straight-up security win for most end-users, ensuring that only those who require Java have it.

Here I am hoping for something like project jigsaw (or something else) to make it easy to modularize my applications and redistribute/install only the JRE pieces I need, and then I read "Starting with this release, JavaFX is now fully integrated into Oracle's Java SE implementation"

So much for a less bloated runtime. I confess I am not sure how big of a size impact JavaFX has (and I'm reasonably sure it has no runtime impact).

Does anybody know how to integrate this into OSX so that it is known to the Java Preferences app ? (/Applicatons/Utilities/Java Preferences.app)

Direct links for downloading Mac OS X versions (*.dmg)

JRE: http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u6-b24/jre-7u6-...

JDK: http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u6-b24/jdk-7u6-...

Dumb question: are there any reasons not to install the updated JDK/JRE?

E.g., any known backward compatibility issues or bad experiences anyone's encountered (aside from looking bad on a retina display)?

What would I gain over Java6? I don't use java for anything, except, I have a couple of apps on my machine that make use of it.

This made my day:

"JavaFX 2.2 introduces full Linux support for both x86 and x64 systems."

does this require lion like the earlier beta installers did?