JDeveloper 10g/11g extension download and installation problems

JDeveloper 11g

Some of you might have seen installation problems with JDeveloper 11g extensions. There has been some changes in OTN download server infrastructure that causes some issues on extension download and installation. The workaround for time being is to download the extension and install from local file system, as described in JDeveloper Product Management blog:

http://blogs.oracle.com/jdeveloperpm/2010/11/installing_jdeveloper_extensions_locally.html

In addition you might check your extension download temporary directory. There might be some unfinished zip files etc. You could just clean that directory up and try downloading again. Download directory is under your JDeveloper user home directory that is pointed by environment variable <JDEV_USER_HOME>\tmp\update. If you haven’t set this, it points to your <JDEV installationHOME>\jdev\tmp\update –directory.

JDeveloper 10g on Windows 7 (64-bit)

For those that have problems installing JDeveloper 10g extensions on Windows 7, there might be other issues. For me the symptom was that I was able to choose and download the wanted extension. Everything seemed working nicely but after JDeveloper restart no extension was installed.

After digging into details of the problem I got to the root problem, not solving the problem all the way, but being able to continue my work.

For me I have multiple JDeveloper versions running on my laptop. I usually edit the <JDEVHOME>/jdev/bin/jdev.conf file so that I change the SetUserHomeVariable to use a different environment variable for different JDev versions. In this case I used environment variable JDEV10134_USER_DIR, which I hadn’t yet assigned to anywhere (so no setting for that). It appears that in this case JDev 10g falls back reading JDEV_USER_HOME environment variable that was actually used by my JDeveloper 11g environment.

So I edited jdev.conf:
SetUserHomeVariable JDEV10134_USER_DIR

And really set my environment variable on system settings:

After this I got my extensions downloading the appropriate place, that was C:\SHARED\jdevhome10134\tmp\update.

Issue being this time that the extensions got downloaded to the right place, but they still didn’t install automatically. When JDeveloper starts it is looking for <JDEV_USER_DIR>/lib/deferred-updates.xml which is supposed to be read and includes instructions how to install the extensions. In my case on Windows 7 (64-bit) the file was read and deleted but extensions were never unzip and placed into the correct directory.

This sounds to be an issue with JDev 10g and Windows 7 not being 100% compatible with each other. JDeveloper 9i or 10g has not been certified with Windows 7.

Anyways, you can get those extensions installed manually and you can continue working on Windows 7.

To install extensions manually open the zip file from <JDEV_USER_DIR>\tmp\update and extract the *.jar file or collection of jar files to extensions directory. In my installation I’ve installed JDeveloper 10.1.3.4 on c:\product\jdevstudio10134, so my extension directory is: C:\product\jdevstudio10134\jdev\extensions.

After unzipping/extracting, restart JDeveloper and you should have all those downloaded extensions working on your JDev 10g.