Maven, JAVA_HOME w/ OS X

Question

Trying to get Maven, Java, and OS X to play nice together - something I've done multiple times without issue on Linux and Windows machines. I assumed all I needed to do was download Maven, setup my environment variables and I'd be good. So here's a snippet from my .bash_profile...

export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/Home/  
export M2_HOME=/usr/local/apache-maven/apache-maven-2.2.1  
export PATH=$PATH:$M2_HOME/bin

The JAVA_HOME setting is what Apple recommends be used on this Q&A page. Yet after launching a terminal and running mvn --version, here's the output...

Apache Maven 2.2.1 (r801777; 2009-08-06 15:16:01-0400)  
Java version: 1.6.0_17  
Java home: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home  
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: MacRoman  
OS name: "mac os x" version: "10.6.2" arch: "x86_64" Family: "mac"

Any idea why the JAVA_HOME I'm setting in my .bash_profile is being ignored by Maven? It's causing problems because things like rt.jar aren't found in the JAVA_HOME Maven is using. I can work around this by creating symbolic links and other hackery in the home Maven is using, but I'd rather have it work correctly since this will just blow up on me the next time Apple pushes a Java update. Thanks for any help...

Answer 1

The problem is that the symbolic link "CurrentJDK" inside the versions of JavaVm.framework points to the old jdk, so when i used the following commands to set the CurrentJDK to the latest one (1.7.0_45) it works

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
sudo rm CurrentJDK
sudo ln -s /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents CurrentJDK

reference: http://java.dzone.com/articles/installing-jdk-7-mac-os-x