Question

i know that the JDK consists of all java packages .But what does the JRE consist of apart from java.exe ? I could understand the necessities of things in ‘bin’ folder in the JRE but what about the ‘lib’ folder ?

Answer 1

Have a look at this JDK and JRE File Structure document from Sun’s JDK documentation.

It specifically says the following about the lib directory:

Code libraries, property settings, and resource files used by the Java runtime environment. For example:

• rt.jar — the bootstrap classes (the RunTime classes that comprise the Java platform’s core API).
• charsets.jar — character conversion classes.

Aside from the ext subdirectory (described below) there are several additional resource subdirectories not described here.