What are the Windows tar.gz files for the Java JRE (7, 8)?

Question

From what I can tell from the tests I did during the last hour, Oracle finally(*) included "xcopy style" packages for the Java JRE on Windows - even for the non server version.

And yes, I know what a gzipped tar file is. It's just that there is no documentation of these files -- vs. the executable installer for Windows is documented.

Looking at the current Java 7 or 8 download pages for the non-server JRE, I see:

• Windows x86 Online jre-7u67-windows-i586-iftw.exe
• Windows x86 Offline jre-7u67-windows-i586.exe
• Windows x86 jre-7u67-windows-i586.tar.gz
• Windows x64 jre-7u67-windows-x64.exe
• Windows x64 jre-7u67-windows-x64.tar.gz

These zipped files don't appear to be mentioned in any docs I could google up, yet their purpose seems to be to not have to run any installer, just copy them to a machine, set up the path(s) correctly, and run them. (and run it does, I tested that).

Still, no mention or docs at all seems odd. So is there any official mentioning of the introduction of these tar.gz files for Windows? As far as I can tell from the historical downloads, they were introduced in J7u9 - and for Java 8 apparently with 8u20.

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_{(*) "finally" is relative ... J7u9 is from 2012-10-16, so it's really not recent, but I only now start to look into getting J6 stuff to run on J7 / J8, so it's nice to see those now.}

Answer 1

The Oracle documentation that describes how to install these tar.gz files (in the Java 8 case) is:

• Server JRE Installation for Microsoft Windows

You basically un-gzip and un-tar one of these downloads and you have a Java JRE or JDK installation. All you need to do then is configure your Java application to use it ... in the appropriate fashion.

(Obviously, this is a Server installation. It isn't registered in the Windows registry and doesn't have auto-update or uninstall functionality.)

The above page is referenced from the Java 8 SE Installation Instructions Overview page.