Download the latest JDK from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html.

You should download the latest JDK and it should work just fine, but you have to select the JDK suitable for your Operating System and its architecture

Depending on the operating system, the installation should be straightforward, as for each operating system, there should be an installer with it, for example, for Windows an exe installer, for Mac you will have a dmg, and an rpm for Linux

Change the JDK installation directory to be inside APPS_HOME.

I chose the location to be C:\Users\amr\dev\apps\jdk\jdk7_25 (jdk 7 update 25) in Windows or /Users/amr/dev/apps/jdk/jdk7_25 in Nix-based systems

Create a JAVA_HOME environment variable, and update the PATH environment variable to look at the bin folder inside our jdk7_25 directory. This will help you greatly if you use the Java command line often.

If you are using Windows, you should add the following environment variable:

JAVA_HOME=%APPS_HOME%\jdk\jdk7_25

You should change the PATH environment variable to the following:

PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;

Make sure you put %JAVA_HOME%\bin inside PATH and not %JAVA_HOME% as we want the path to reference all the Java executable files such as java and javac

If you are using Mac or any other Nix-based system, you should edit the .bash_profile file to be the following:

export JAVA_HOME=$APPS_HOME/jdk/jdk7_25
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

Notice that in Nix-based systems editing a .bash_profile is little bit different as the separator is a colon and not a semicolon