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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T03:24:18+00:00

The Java Preferences application on my OS X Lion workstation indicates that I have

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The Java Preferences application on my OS X Lion workstation indicates that I have Java SE 6 v1.6.0_29-b11-402 installed (both 32- and 64-bit versions). Unfortunately, I need additional features at are only available in the Enterprise Edition.

A comment by ‘Jesper’ in ‘How install a specific jdk on Mac OS X?‘ suggests that I need to use the Java supplied by Apple, rather than the one from Oracle/Sun. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that Apple offers an Enterprise Edition of Java 6.

This leads me to ask a number of questions:

  1. Did I miss something? Does Apple offer an EE of Java 6?
  2. If 1 is true, how do I get it? Can it be installed ‘side by side’ with the Java SE 6?
  3. If 1 is false, can a Oracle/Sun version be used? Is there a recommended installation location? I’m guess that the /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/ folder is not recommended.
  4. The Oracle/Sun version seems to include a lot of extras (e.g. Glassfish) that I would prefer not to install. Can I install the core SDK w/o the extras? Will Tomcat 7 work as an alternative to Glassfish?

** edit **

This question is a result of another question that I posted: RESTful web service: java.lang.NullPointerException service.AbstractFacade.findAll. It seems that this particular error is a result of a missing annotation (@Stateless). This annotation is ‘contained’ in the javax.ejb.* namespace, which is contained in a .JAR file that is not on my workstation.

This led me to conclude that I needed the ‘Enterprise Edition’ of Java 6 (which would have the missing .JAR file and other dependent files). I suppose if there was a way to determine which .JAR file is missing (Netbeans 7 doesn’t seem to help with this) I probably could just add it to the project and skip the EE hassles.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There is no such thing as a special runtime called Enterprise Edition of Java for any platform.

    There is Java SE and there are simply some interfaces that an Enterprise Edition container implements.

    Sun confused the market with the naming convention years ago when they came up with J2EE. It never was a separate version of Java, just some tacked on APIs that if a server implemented them and passed some certification, could call themselves a J2EE container.

    They further confused the market when they started calling it Java EE 6.

    If you are developing against these APIs all you need is the .jar files that contain these interface declarations. You can download these API .jar files which used to be called J2EE. But they are pretty useless by themselves.

    But I doubt that you are wanting to write a Java EE server, you want to use one. If you want to use a server then you need to download a Java EE compliant server and use the .jar files it provides.

    Every IDE worth using includes these in some form, usually by defining a Server that you will be deploying against. Tomcat isn’t a fully EE container. It is a Servlet container, which is a subset of the full EE specifications.

    As of OSX Lion, Apple doesn’t supply a JDK anymore, it is only the Oracle one, which you apparently already successfully acquired.

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