What are the Common Practices for Java Development on Linux?

Q> Where do you install your JDK from?
A> I never bother with other JDKs coming from outside Sun/Oracle mainly because our product is only certified to work with Sun/Oracle JRE. On my desktop, I run Kubuntu, but I never use apt-get for this but always download them manually. Reasons:

• distro maintainers rarely rush to upgrade packages, as their primary concern is to make dependant apps (such as OpenOffice) work. If JDK changes from 1.6.0_20 to 1.6.0_21, they simply don't care. I might do because a newer patch might have an important bugfix or I simply want to try if my app still passes all the unit tests.
• it might be a nightmare to retain old JDK versions. We still support older versions of our product and if I upgrade to a newer Kubuntu, I don't have guarantees that some ancient JDK will still be available as a package.
• I am not sure some distros even support multiple existence of JDKs on the same machine.

My preference is to keep all JDKs/JREs in /opt and make a symlink to the newest one or the one I need most. I simply don't see why installing JDK manually is a problem.

I also set the PATH to the newest JDK/JRE.

Same thing (and similar arguments) apply to Ant and Maven.

Q> Where do you install Eclipse?
A> I use IntelliJ but the same applies. I store IDE in my home folder. This allows me to have different versions of it, update them without needing sudo, etc. I could as well install it in /opt but I guess I got this habit when I was downloading and testing newest IntelliJ IDEA EAP every week so I can quickly delete the older versions and do not pollute /opt. Finally, other programs might require Ant/Maven/JDK but it's only me who uses IntelliJ hence the different approach.

Q> Where do you put your Jetty/Tomcat?
A> I have a separate folder tomcats under /home where I have ~10 different Tomcat instances. Each of Tomcats is used for a different version of my app (we bundle Tomcat with our app). This is necessary because one deployment of our app can have different Tomcat settings (or even version) than another.

Q> What are some of the differences between the way you setup development versus production
A> It very much depends on your app. For example, we need some partitions to have lower access latencies but having less space (e.g. gigabytes for Lucene indexes) VS others which can have higher latencies but require more space (e.g. terabytes for content repositories). We, however, design our app so that all these different aspects can reside on different partitions which are configurable. Some partitions need to have special limitations (e.g. file upload) so this doesn't overflow other partitions. There is no simple one-for-all answer to this question, but obviously most of these concerns don't matter that much for a development environment.

Where do you install your JDK from?

I use Arch Linux myself, and we have the oracle jdk/jre in the repository itself. Hence, use your distro-repository if it has the oracle jdk/jre else get it from oracle itself.

Where do you install Eclipse?

Again, the same answer as above applies to this as well. If however, there is any issue with the distro provided version, I always put my custom installs in /opt/ - /opt/java , /opt/eclipse, /opt/netbeans - etc. I dont install stuff in my home folder (except in circumstances where I don't have permission anywhere else - rare), since that would mean that other users would need access to my home folder to run the stuff. I don't want production (or development for that matter) stuff having direct access to my home.

Where do you put your Jetty/Tomcat?

The same answer as above applies here as well. Only in circumstances, where I have installed more than one version, I create an /opt/experimental/ and install there so that I know which one my production is running and which one I can remove when no longer required.

What are some of the differences between the way you setup development versus production?

If possible, I always setup different machines for production and development work. Different computers, but exactly identical setup. The only systems that can push code to the production system are those in the development group. Where this segregation is not possible, I prefer to have different install for the servers, so that while I am tweaking the development configuration, my main servers don't crash or something. Also development setup will generally include a clean_up script that makes it ready for production (dropping unnecessary priviledges for db accounts, cleaning up, etc.

Have whatever, setup you will, just make sure you have different database setup for development and production purposes.

The Sun version of Java for openSUSE is on the nonOSS disk (go here and scroll down for an ISO), which is an additional disk image, not part of the main install disk ISO (or you can pull the RPMs from here).

As far as eclipse is concerned, if I'm installing at the system level, I tend to drop it in /opt. You might want to read this article on how best to handle plugins.

(Don't let them steer you off openSUSE, it is the best distro for KDE IMO.)