Java Development Kit

The Java Development Kit (JDK) is an implementation of either one of the Java Platform, Standard Edition; Java Platform, Enterprise Edition or Java Platform, Micro Edition platforms released by Oracle Corporation in the form of a binary product aimed at Java developers on Solaris, Linux, Mac OS X or Windows. The JDK includes a private JVM and a few other resources to finish the development of a Java Application. Since the introduction of the Java platform, it has been by far the most widely used Software Development Kit (SDK). On 17 November 2006, Sun announced that they would release it under the GNU General Public License (GPL), thus making it free software. This happened in large part on 8 May 2007, when Sun contributed the source code to the OpenJDK.

The JDK has as its primary components a collection of programming tools, including:

Experimental tools may not be available in future versions of the JDK.

The JDK also comes with a complete Java Runtime Environment, usually called a private runtime, due to the fact that it is separated from the "regular" JRE and has extra contents. It consists of a Java Virtual Machine and all of the class libraries present in the production environment, as well as additional libraries only useful to developers, such as the internationalization libraries and the IDL libraries.