What are the differences between private jre and public jre?

Question

What are the differences between private jre and public jre? Is there some official paper about this topic?

I didn\'t find any question on SO about this topic. Nor I was

Answer 1

A JRE is nothing but a folder that contains JVM executables, setting files, required lib files, and extensions. You can install multiple JREs on your system Sun generally installs versions in C:\Program Files\Java as jre eg.jre1.6.0_06.

A Public JRE is available to all Java programs, Browsers, and the libs in this JRE folder are available to applications started in command line like java com.sarathonline.cli.HelloWorld This JRE is also registered in path, and Browser plugin.

A Private JRE is something that is installed in the system but is not referred to by default. This could be a copy of the JRE / JDK folder from another installed directory. If you see a my earlier post: starting eclipse with jre 1.6 where your environment is in 1.4, The JRE1.6 is used only by Eclipse, this is a private JRE. While the JAVA_HOME points to 1.4. This is a public JRE.

Source:

http://blog.sarathonline.com/2008/07/public-and-private-jre.html

Some more discussion on the topic:

http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t649860-private-vs-public-jre-in-different-oss.html