Installing Groovy - Making Java Groovy - page 388

Appendix A. Installing Groovy
InstallingGroovyiseasy.Thisappendixshowsyouhowtodoit,withareviewofthevarious
options involved.
A.1. Installing a JDK
Groovy generates Java bytecodes that are interpreted by a Java virtual machine. This means
you have to have Java installed in order to install Groovy. You need a full Java Development
Kit (JDK), rather than a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). You only need the Standard Edi-
tion (SE) of Java, rather than the Enterprise [ 1 ] Edition.
1 Just as an aside, when did the word business get deprecated in favor of the word enterprise ? Is it a Star Trek thing?
Does being an Enterprise Architect mean you design starships for a living? Are Enterprise Java Beans used when
making coffee on a starship?
The official JDK for Java SE is available from Oracle at http://mng.bz/83Ct . At the time of
this writing, the current version is Java SE 7u25 (Java 7, update 25), but Groovy works on
any version of Java 1.5 and above.
Be sure to set an environment variable called JAVA_HOME to point to the installation dir-
ectory. You also probably want to add the bin folder under JAVA_HOME to your path.
On Windows that will look like this:
C:\> set JAVA_HOME="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0"
C:\> set PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;%PATH%
Those commands will set the JAVA_HOME and PATH properties in the local shell. To set
them everywhere, right-click My Computer, select Properties, click Advanced, and then
click Environment Variables. Add them as System variables, and start a new shell. [ 2 ]
2 The specifics of the process will be slightly different on different Windows versions, but the concepts are the same.
Set the variables as System environment variables, and start a new shell because Windows won't update an existing
one.