Join the DZone community and get the full member experience.

Join For Free

To get JDK 7 up,

I downloaded the JDK from Oracle. They have a nice dmg file, which makes it easy to install.
After reading their installation instructions and running /usr/libexec/java_home (which I didn't even know about), it still wasn't defaulting to JDK 7.

Surgery required. So, I headed over to:

$ java -version java version '1.7.004' Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.004-b21) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.0-b21, mixed mode) This tutorial shows you how to install Java SE 7 Developer Preview on Mac OS X 10.7.2 Lion running on my MacBook Pro. Download the Oracle JDK7 Mac OS X port dmg file from here. Java SE 7 Archive Downloads. Go to the Oracle Java Archive page. Thank you for downloading this release of the Java TM Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit (JDK TM).The JDK is a development environment for building applications, applets, and components using the Java programming language. With Mac OS 10.7 (Lion) and later, the Java runtime is no longer installed automatically as part of the OS installation. Follow any of the methods below to install Java runtime. Java manual download page. Get the latest version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) for Windows, Mac, Solaris, and Linux. This video shows you how to install Java JDK on Mac OSX. In the first step, go to Google and search for 'Download Java JDK'. Java JDK stands for Java Develop.

This is where the system jvm's are stored. You'll notice a symbolic link for CurrentJDK. It probably points to:

You're going to want to point that to the new JDK, which java_home tells us is located in:

So, the magic commands you need are:

Then, you should be good:

java,jdk,mac osx

Published at DZone with permission of Brian O' Neill, DZone MVB. See the original article here.

Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.

Newest post on how to install Oracle JDK 8 / Java SE 8 on Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite can be found here.

At the time of this writing, there is no official release of Java SE 7 / Oracle JDK 1.7 on Mac OS X. It is still in developer preview based on Apple’s contributions to OpenJDK. The Developer Preview is provided to the community so that the developers can get feedback on the ongoing progress of the project. The developer preview should work on any Intel-based Mac and has been tested on Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion).

UPDATE

Oracle has launched the official Java SE 7 for Mac OS X 64-bit platform. You can download it from here.

This tutorial shows you how to install Java SE 7 Developer Preview on Mac OS X 10.7.2 Lion running on my MacBook Pro.

1. Download the Oracle JDK7 Mac OS X port dmg file from here. At the time of this writing, the version of the JDK7 is Oracle JDK7 build b223 released on December 23, 2011. The dmg file name is jdk-7-ea-macosx-b223.dmg

2. Create a JavaVirtualMachines folder under /Library/Java if it doesn’t exist.

In my case, the JavaVirtualMachines is already there so I don’t need to create it manually.

3. Open the jdk-7-ea-macosx-b223.dmg file by double-clicking on it. Then drag the JDK 1.7.0 Developer Preview icon in the left side to the JavaVirtualMachines icon folder in the right side.

4. Go to /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines directory using Finder application. Then double-click the ‘JDK 1.7.0 Developer Preview’ icon. This will open the Java Preferences window. Here you can change the preferred order of the installed Java platforms by dragging it up or down. Make sure the Java SE 7 is in the preferred order or you can simply deselect the Java SE 6 version.

Java Jdk 7 Free Download For Mac

5. Now issue the ‘java -version’ command in the terminal window to verify.

Download Java Jdk 7 Mac Version

6. Done