View Single Post
Old 12-20-2004, 02:02 PM   #7 (permalink)
Belisarius
Java fanboy
 
Belisarius's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2003
Posts: 1,174
Belisarius is on a distinguished road
If you hadn't installed Java before, I'm not sure where it's from, but I have a guess. It might be the court-mandated install of Sun's JVM by Microsoft.

j2re1.4.1_03 is a version of Java that's actually a bit out of date, as the most recent j2re1.4.x is 1.4.2_0-something-or-other.

In a more general sense, everything after Java 1.1 is labeled as Java2 (hence the "j2"). It's just dumb marketing by Sun. It makes sense in a way, since there was a major overhaul of the core library in Java 1.2, but they could have kept everything nice and simple and just called it Java 1.2. Now, with the release of Java 1.5, they've started calling it Java5, but it's also Java2, which in the grand scheme of things means jack squat; it's Java 1.x, with 1.5 being the most recent, although a lot of people still use 1.4. If you just say "Java One-Five", everyone who talks Java (at least, everyone who isn't a bull**** artist) knows exactly what you're talking about.

Ok, with that confusing corporate-speak explaination out of the way, if it's labeled "j2re", that means it's the Runtime Environment. The Runtime Environment contains only what is necessary to run Java programs. The "SDK" contains both the Runtime Environment, and everything necessary to create Java programs.
__________________
GitS
Belisarius is offline   Reply With Quote