New to Java

Hi all,

The company I work for appear to be taking a new direction with their IT infrastructure in that they seem to be moving from a primarily Microsoft environment to an open source one.

As such, I thought I'd better start looking into the Java world and getting my head around how things work. I've spent a number of days, being confused by the terms J2SE, J2EE, Java SE, Java EE, JRE, JDK and SDK but finally, I think I've got it sussed.

What I'm looking for here is a confirmation that either a) I'm right or b) I've been driven entirely mad.

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JRE (Java Runtime Environment) is installed on any PC that wants to run java applications. This will be most "normal" people's computers.

SDK (Software Development Kit) is installed on developers computers so that they can create java files, compile them into classes and then pass them onto the JRE to run them.

JDK (Java Development Kit) is an SDK specific to Java SE (Standard Edition of Java).

Java EE (Enterprise Edition of Java) SDK is built on top of the Java SE JDK, hence you can download Java EE SDK with or without the Java SE JDK (because you might already have the Java SE JDK installed).

J2SE and J2EE were the names of the versions of Java and were followed by point number indicating their update number. Now though, the names have been simplified to Java SE and Java EE and are simply followed by a release number. So J2SE 1.5.0 is now Java SE 5 and J2EE 1.4.0 is Java EE 4.

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So, if I want to begin developing rich web applications using the NetBeans or Eclipse IDE's, I need to install the Java EE (latest version) SDK with the Java SE JDK and JRE (which may all be available in one bundle - not sure).

Am I close?

I hope you lovely folks can help.

Thanks

Richard