How to install a Java runtime on Apple Mac OSX Mountain Lion

One of the (perhaps) understandable but more irritating aspects of Apple Mac OSX upgrades which I just experienced is the fact that my upgrade from lion to mountain lion is that the Java runtime (JRE) is uninstalled…This meant that my usual code editor/IDE Netbeans was broken – not good!

So i searched around and found some installers e.g. from Oracle but I couldn’t be 100% sure they were going to work. Experience tells me that I should be careful installing JRE’s as broken installs can be a real pig to fix.

So I thought I’d just double check that my JRE was definitely removed by launching a terminal and typing “java -v” (which actually seems to be incorrect but was a guess) and luckily enough, OSX detected that I wanted a JRE and offered to download it for me. The install worked as far as I can tell and Netbeans is now working, bonus!

Just thought that might help someone out and save some time messing around.