Should JAVA_HOME point to JDK or JRE?

Question

I pointed the JAVA_HOME to C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Java\\jre7. It works fine. Afterwards, I unzipped ant and set up the environment variables rela

Answer 1

Simply (change to your jdk1.x.x.x_xx)

JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_05

Answer 2

as a developer, you should point your JAVA_HOME at jdk to access javac copiler etc. It's good if you can test your program to run on the JRE though. If you are using an app server you often also need the JDK instead of the JRE but that depends on the particular server.