Preferred places for installing these softwares

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Hey,
I know there are rules but what are the preferred places to install:
1. Servers like Tomcat, Glassfish ...
2. Tools like Gradle, Gant
3. Languages like Groovy, Scala, Clojure ..
I'm the only user for my Mac
Thanks.

[Bear Bibeault]

There are two schools of thought:

Install them in the traditional Unix locations. E.g. /usr/local.

Install them somewhere where the Finder can see them.

I'm in the later camp, so:

If it's a server (or other non-GUI tool): /Library

If it's a GUI application: /Applications

[Hussein Baghdadi]

Do you prefer /Library for programming languages?

[Bear Bibeault]

Anything that's not a GUI.