Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

BEA JRockit JDK

The BEA JRockit JDK is another JDK that you can use on Windows and Linux. See JRockit's home page at http://www.bea.com/products/weblogic/jrockit/index.shtml for technical details on this JDK. You can download JRockit from http://commerce.bea.com/showallversions.jsp?family=wljr.

JRockit's disk installation footprint is the largest of the JDKs we tried. It features some custom threading and garbage collection models, which are worth trying if you want to optimize your Tomcat's server performance. JRockit has a nice graphical installer that worked just fine for us on the first try. Figure A-2 shows the opening installer window.

Figure A-2. The BEA JRockit graphical installer on Fedora Linux

The installer asks for a filesystem location to install the JDK but not much else. This is shown in Figure A-3. It's probably a good idea to have it install into /opt on Linux, and C:\Program Files on Windows.

Figure A-3. Choosing a directory to install JRockit into

Once JRockit is installed, just set JAVA_HOME and PATH correctly, and it's ready:

$ JAVA_HOME=/opt/jrockit-R27.2.0-jdk1.6.0_02
$ export JAVA_HOME
$ PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH
$ export PATH

Then, test out your installation:

$ which java
/opt/jrockit-R27.2.0-jdk1.6.0/bin/java
$ java -version java version "1.6.0" Java(TM) SE Runtime ...