1 Introduction

The Java programming language was released on May 23rd 1995. One would expect that after all this time, Java applications would be easy to install and ready to run from a single package, or port on FreeBSD, thus making it easy to use. This is not the case, unfortunately, as the Java distribution is controlled very closely by Sun Microsystems, who prohibits re-distribution. All Java applets must be compiled from source code, together with the Java Development Kit from Sun Microsystems. All these ingredients must be blended together in the right order, assembled, and compiled by the end user. With such distribution philosophies at heart, it is my opinion that Java on FreeBSD will always be for developer or hacker use only. I certainly found this to be true when I needed to serve up some .jsp pages for a client on my web server, and needed to get www/jakarta-tomcat4 to work with www/apache13 on my FreeBSD system.

The Tomcat portion of the install is very straightforward, but the difficulty I had was getting the Java Development Kit up and running on FreeBSD 4.X, as Sun only supplies binaries for Linux, Solaris™, and Windows NT®. This means that I had to compile my own JDK™ for FreeBSD. I began by searching for documentation on the Internet. I quickly found that there is more source code than I need along with patches to the source code, but very little documentation of what to do after obtaining everything.

In this article, you will find how to install the Java Development Kit for FreeBSD, and how to get up and running with Tomcat. A reference section is also provided for further reading.