java/scala/sbt after java reinstall java7

Question

I have a background in pyton and javascript. For my work I would like to develop some extra skills in the scala language. I needed java 7 for Coursera's Functional Programming course to get the homework assignments tool to work. Unfortunately, none of the java tools seem to work on my machine after deinstalling java 8 and installing java7.

In the terminal I get this;

$ java
Unable to locate an executable at "/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/Home/bin/java" (-1)
$ scala 
Unable to locate an executable at "/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/Home/bin/java" (-1)
$ sbt
Unable to locate an executable at "/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/Home/bin/java" (-1)

It seems like java cannot find the right jdk, so I changed the JAVA_HOME variable. In my .zshrc file I have the following defined;

export $JAVA_HOME='/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_55.jdk/Contents/Home/bin'

Oddly, to me, this gives an error when I start up a new terminal.

/Users/code/.zshrc:80: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_55.jdk/Contents/Home/bin not found  

This is odd to me because I can cd to this link from the terminal. And from there I can confirm that it exists;

$  pwd
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_55.jdk/Contents/Home/bin
$  ls
appletviewer   java           jcmd           jmc            jstatd         policytool     servertool
apt            javac          jconsole       jps            jvisualvm      rmic           tnameserv
extcheck       javadoc        jdb            jrunscript     keytool        rmid           unpack200
idlj           javafxpackager jhat           jsadebugd      native2ascii   rmiregistry    wsgen
jar            javah          jinfo          jstack         orbd           schemagen      wsimport
jarsigner      javap          jmap           jstat          pack200        serialver      xjc

Again, I am rather new to java and even more new on how the terminal variables need to be defined for it to work, so I might be missing a huge point. What step am I missing?

Answer 1

Your $JAVA_HOME variable should point to the Home directory, not the bin directory, so change your env variable to:

$ export JAVA_HOME='/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_55.jdk/Contents/Home/'