I have a related problem with Tomcat5.5.
Tomcat 5.5 docs seem to imply the full JDK is not needed because of eclipse. My tests show that to be true when I start Tomcat5.5 using the startup.bat under Windows XP Home. It only requires the system environment variable JRE_HOME to be set to my jre, i.e. “C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0”.
But when I install Tomcat5.5 as a service (using service.bat install), it won’t start, and the stdout.log file has the error:
“This release of Apache Tomcat was packaged to run on J2SE 5.0
or later. It can be run on earlier JVMs by downloading and
installing a compatibility package from the Apache Tomcat
binary download page.”
I tried setting JAVA_HOME to the same path as JRE_HOME, but that didn’t help. I checked the registry and I do have a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE|SOFTWARE|JavaSoft|Java Development Kit|1.4 key pointing to my Borland JBuilder JDK location. Does anyone know if the service finds the java runtime differently from the startup.bat, or if there is some other setting I need to set?