Experience Report - Installing Oracle JDeveloper

experience-report-installing-oracle-jdeveloper.txt

Thought you might enjoy reading about the experiences one has on the journey of installing
Oracle JDeveloper, which is on a whole 'nother level of application installation.
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After reading 4 different documentation sites on Oracle's website and trying three
different ways to download the JDeveloper installer, I found what seems like the right path.

The docs for the first JDeveloper installer I found said "Note: if you want to use this 
installer to solve Alex's problems, it will not work. Go to this other doc-site and
install the JDeveloperQuickInstallerForAlex". Those docs had me download an 
Oracle-custom downloader for this one Oracle thing.

After installing an Oracle-custom downloader, it gave me 6 files, of which I ended 
up needing only need two (I think).

After reading the docs, they told me to run this command on the terminal:

    > %JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe -jar .\fmw_12.2.1.4.0_soa_quickstart.jar

Which meant I had to try 4 times to set the “JAVA_HOME” variable to the correct
value in Windows. After I got that working, I got this error when running that command:

    The jar file C:\Users\me\Downloads\V983385-01_1of2\fmw_12.2.1.4.0_soa_quickstart2.jar needed for this installer is missing.
    
After putting that “quickstart2.jar” file in the right place, I got this error:

   Unable to access or modify the system registry.
   Select Run as Administrator when opening the Command Prompt and try again.

After running that command in a terminal as Administrator, I got this error:

    The OpenJDK JVM is not supported on this platform.

Up to this point, I've been familiar with these sorts of problems and solving 
them was pretty easy. When considering this last error, my feeling changes to 
shock and near-hopelessness. The other tool I use every day for my normal job 
also requires a JDK, but its docs say it requires this particular version of 
the JDK. So, if I change my version of Java to be the one required by JDeveloper, 
then I won’t be able to use my normal tool easily on my system.

So, the journey continues – I will need to find a way of running two different
versions of the JDK on one computer. This might require me to write custom shell
scripts, which is always regrettable.