Java update query

May 13, 2007 1:02 PM

Java update query (extreme ignorance)

Java's updated (PC) and now in my program list I have

J2SE runtime environment 5.0 update 6.0

and

Java (TM) runtime environment 6.0 update 1.0

Do I need both of them? Usually an update deletes the previous version? Or these two different programs I need to keep?

posted by A189Nut to computers & internet (5 comments total)

You should be able to remove the 5.0 environment without any trouble. Any program you might have that was made to run in version 5 will run in version 6, but not the other way around.
posted by cerebus19 at 1:15 PM on May 13, 2007

I find it quite annoying that what Sun calls an "update" is actually a full, fresh installation of their current version.

Somewhere on the Java website I found their official excuse for this crap: apparently somewhere there might perhaps exist some Java app written against a specific version of the runtime environment, and you might find it breaks if you remove that specific version after an update.

Personally I would rather wait until that actually happens, then either find an updated version of whatever broke or reinstall the older version of Java if I really really needed to, than keep tens of superseded 100+MB Java installations on my machine "just in case".

I have never actually seen removal of an older version of Java cause a problem. Has anybody else?
posted by flabdablet at 6:27 PM on May 13, 2007

The only reason I keep two versions of Java (both JDK's) on my system is because I'm a programmer that has to support legacy code. The JRE should be fully backwards-compatible for code execution, however, so delete away.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 7:43 PM on May 13, 2007

In theory as the others mentioned the new version should be good enough. The only problem you'll run into if programs were written with quirks or bugs in previous versions of the JRE in mind. If that behavior changes in later versions then the program stops working correctly.
posted by mmascolino at 8:51 PM on May 13, 2007

I have never actually seen removal of an older version of Java cause a problem. Has anybody else?

I have -- older versions of DVArchive (software designed to emulate a ReplayTV over a home network) would only run under JRE 1.4 -- I think DVA did an explicit version check and failed if the version it found was not 1.4.x. When Sun released 1.5 the most common question asked on the DVA forum was how to have two versions of Java coexist on the same system. The current version works under any version of Java, but the guy who wrote DVA has a day job, so it took him a while to put out a version that fixed the problem.

/derail
posted by harkin banks at 9:49 AM on May 14, 2007