Originally posted by Nigel Kat:
JAVA_HOME can be anything you need it to be. The important part is that it is the path which leads to the bin directory of the SDK that you want to provide the JVM for the web server. Different people set up their machines differently. Not wrong, just different.
With the caveat that the poster was referring to a particular version of JAVA_HOME that definately *is* wrong. You can't substitute a JRE for a JDK.