Installing JDeveloper 11.1.1.7.0 from the Generic Installer Jar on 64bit Windows System

If you have installed JDev 11.1.1.7.0 lately, which I strongly recommend, you may have noticed, that the windows installer jdevstudio11117install.exe still ships with jdk160_24. Please don’t ask why Oracle don’t includes a JDk 1.7, I don’t know.
Well, it’s time to use JDK1.7 on my WIn7x64 system so I loaded hte jdevstudio11117install.jar which is a lot bigger (1.9GB) but comes without a bundeld JDK. As I have already installed JDK 1.7.0_17 on my system I pointed the installation to this jdk when I asked during the installation.
Everything went smooth and i took only a couple of minutes to install JDev and generate the embedded WLS 10.3.5 instance.

However, when I tried to start the embedded WLS instance I got the following error message

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*** Using port 7101 *** r:\jdeveloper\system\system11.1.1.7.40.64.93\DefaultDomain\bin\startWebLogic.cmd [waiting for the server to complete its initialization...] . . JAVA Memory arguments: -Xms256m -Xmx512m . WLS Start Mode=Development . CLASSPATH=... . PATH=... . *************************************************** *  To start WebLogic Server, use a username and   * *  password assigned to an admin-level user.  For * *  server administration, use the WebLogic Server * *  console at http:\\hostname:port\console        * *************************************************** starting weblogic with Java version: <strong>Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine. Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit. Unrecognized option: -jrockit</strong> Starting WLS with line: ... Process exited.

Hm, ‘Unrecognized option: -jrockit‘, how’s that? I’m running Sun JDK!
Right at the beginning of the server start we see the command used to start the server (the path may be different on your system)
r:\jdeveloper\system\system11.1.1.7.40.64.93\DefaultDomain\bin\startWebLogic.cmd
A look into this command shell reveals that another command shell script is called
r:\jdeveloper\system\system11.1.1.7.40.64.93\DefaultDomain\bin\setDomainEnv.cmd
In this script we find the problem

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... set BEA_JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_17   set SUN_JAVA_HOME=     if "%JAVA_VENDOR%"=="Oracle" (     set JAVA_HOME=%BEA_JAVA_HOME% ) else (     if "%JAVA_VENDOR%"=="Sun" (         set JAVA_HOME=%SUN_JAVA_HOME%     ) else (         set JAVA_VENDOR=Oracle         set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_17     ) ) ...

As you see hte BEA_JAVA_HOME is set and if you put an
echo %JAVA_VENDOR%
before the if statement you see that the vendor is null. This sets the JAVA_HOME correct, but sets the JAVA_VENDOR to ‘Oracle’. This then adds the wrong option -jrockit to the command line later on in the startWebLogic.cmd script.

Now that we know that the solution is to make a small change to the
r:\jdeveloper\system\system11.1.1.7.40.64.93\DefaultDomain\bin\setDomainEnv.cmd
script. We only have to set the SUN_JAVA_HOME and set the JAVA_VENDOR to ‘Sun’

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set BEA_JAVA_HOME=   set SUN_JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_17 set JAVA_VENDOR=Sun

After this change the embedded WLS server starts without a problem.