What are the Common Practices for Java Development on Linux?

Question

I'm trying to migrate from Windows to Linux as a Java development platform, and while the transition has generally been pretty painless, there are a few points of uncertainty that I'd like some feedback on. I'm running openSUSE 11.4, but I'm open to hear what works on other distros.

1. Where do you install your JDK from? This one is surprisingly not as cut and dry as most people make it out to be. OpenJDk 6 is available in the openSUSE repositories, and was very easy to install. However it's currently update 21, and right now the Oracle release is at update 24. I'm used to a little alert in Windows notifying me that my Java needs updating but that doesn't appear to be the norm in Linux. Do Java developers forgo the JDK in their package manager and install the binary directly? Or is there another way?
2. Where do you install Eclipse? There seems to be a general agreement online that Eclipse is best installed by simply downloading the binary and extracting it somewhere, but where's the usual place I would extract a program like Eclipse or Ant? I've seen votes for /usr/local and /opt online, but no definitive answer.
3. Where do you put your Jetty/Tomcat? Similar to the eclipse question, where do most Linux Java developers put their Jetty/Tomcat/other container.
4. What are some of the differences between the way you setup development versus production At the very least it seems I don't want to run my servlet container as root, that makes sense to me. But what other practices should I watch out for? Is there anything else that could make my development environment easier, but perhaps less secure?

I found this question was similar but ultimately too high level and didn't get into details of how actual developers are setting up their environment. If there's other resources you feel answer these questions, please share them here.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Q> Where do you install your JDK from?
A> I never bother with other JDKs coming from outside Sun/Oracle mainly because our product is only certified to work with Sun/Oracle JRE. On my desktop, I run Kubuntu, but I never use apt-get for this but always download them manually. Reasons:

• distro maintainers rarely rush to upgrade packages, as their primary concern is to make dependant apps (such as OpenOffice) work. If JDK changes from 1.6.0_20 to 1.6.0_21, they simply don't care. I might do because a newer patch might have an important bugfix or I simply want to try if my app still passes all the unit tests.
• it might be a nightmare to retain old JDK versions. We still support older versions of our product and if I upgrade to a newer Kubuntu, I don't have guarantees that some ancient JDK will still be available as a package.
• I am not sure some distros even support multiple existence of JDKs on the same machine.

My preference is to keep all JDKs/JREs in /opt and make a symlink to the newest one or the one I need most. I simply don't see why installing JDK manually is a problem.

I also set the PATH to the newest JDK/JRE.

Same thing (and similar arguments) apply to Ant and Maven.

Q> Where do you install Eclipse?
A> I use IntelliJ but the same applies. I store IDE in my home folder. This allows me to have different versions of it, update them without needing sudo, etc. I could as well install it in /opt but I guess I got this habit when I was downloading and testing newest IntelliJ IDEA EAP every week so I can quickly delete the older versions and do not pollute /opt. Finally, other programs might require Ant/Maven/JDK but it's only me who uses IntelliJ hence the different approach.

Q> Where do you put your Jetty/Tomcat?
A> I have a separate folder tomcats under /home where I have ~10 different Tomcat instances. Each of Tomcats is used for a different version of my app (we bundle Tomcat with our app). This is necessary because one deployment of our app can have different Tomcat settings (or even version) than another.

Q> What are some of the differences between the way you setup development versus production
A> It very much depends on your app. For example, we need some partitions to have lower access latencies but having less space (e.g. gigabytes for Lucene indexes) VS others which can have higher latencies but require more space (e.g. terabytes for content repositories). We, however, design our app so that all these different aspects can reside on different partitions which are configurable. Some partitions need to have special limitations (e.g. file upload) so this doesn't overflow other partitions. There is no simple one-for-all answer to this question, but obviously most of these concerns don't matter that much for a development environment.

Answer 2

Where do you install your JDK from?

I use Arch Linux myself, and we have the oracle jdk/jre in the repository itself. Hence, use your distro-repository if it has the oracle jdk/jre else get it from oracle itself.

Where do you install Eclipse?

Again, the same answer as above applies to this as well. If however, there is any issue with the distro provided version, I always put my custom installs in /opt/ - /opt/java , /opt/eclipse, /opt/netbeans - etc. I dont install stuff in my home folder (except in circumstances where I don't have permission anywhere else - rare), since that would mean that other users would need access to my home folder to run the stuff. I don't want production (or development for that matter) stuff having direct access to my home.

Where do you put your Jetty/Tomcat?

The same answer as above applies here as well. Only in circumstances, where I have installed more than one version, I create an /opt/experimental/ and install there so that I know which one my production is running and which one I can remove when no longer required.

What are some of the differences between the way you setup development versus production?

If possible, I always setup different machines for production and development work. Different computers, but exactly identical setup. The only systems that can push code to the production system are those in the development group. Where this segregation is not possible, I prefer to have different install for the servers, so that while I am tweaking the development configuration, my main servers don't crash or something. Also development setup will generally include a clean_up script that makes it ready for production (dropping unnecessary priviledges for db accounts, cleaning up, etc.

Have whatever, setup you will, just make sure you have different database setup for development and production purposes.