Using FDS with Java 5

I found this little tidbit of information tucked away in my documents folder and I figured I might as well share it.

While attending the flex data services course, we were told that both Flex Builder and FDS2 are 100% compatible with Java 5, even though they both ship with the 1.4.xx JRE. Now I'm still looking to wildly expand my Java knowledge, and every book out there is Java 1.5, not to mention certain tools like the Hibernate code generators for Eclipse, optimize their code for Java 5... so I went home that night and decided I was going to make it happen.

First off, I like my Java folder to be close at hand, so I installed the Java 5 jdk first, disabling the automatic installation of the JRE, because the install seemingly won't let me change the install folder of the JRE. Then I installed the JRE seperately. In the end they were located in C:\Java\JDK.. and C:\Java\JRE... respectively.

Then moving on to Flex Data Services (integrated with JRUN edition). In FDS2 I opened the jvm.config file in C:\fds2\jrun4\bin and changed the line java.home=C:/fds2/UninstallerData/jre to java.home=C:/Java/jdk1.5.0_07. I also moved the JRE in uninstallerdata to my desktop to make sure it wasn't being used. I then started FDS2 and it started up fine. (NOTE: originally I pointed it to the JRE, but loading my test .JSP page would fail because it couldn't find com/sun/tools/javac/Main).

Incidentally I also added the JAVA_HOME environment variable to my XP machine and pointed it to the JDK. This takes care of Flex Builder and the Flex SDK as well. (I tested this further in fds and it appears that the jvm.config setting overrides the java_home variable - so if you want to use the java_home for fds2, blank out the value in the jvm.config).

Finally, when you start up the Adobe Flex 2 Command Prompt, it tells you what version of Java it's using. I haven't had any issues at all since upgrading to Java 5. Looks like the instructor was right after all.