A Bug's Life

It is in fact so complicated that most software recruitment agents get it wrong.

All distributions of Java are either a JRE or a JDK.
a JRE is what you need to *run* java. A JDK is what you develop with, but also includes a runtime environment too. Sometimes the JRE is included as a web browser plugin.

You will always want a JDK since you sometimes do development.

Now, the particular flavour of JDK depends on what software you want to run. There is a small Java for use on mobile phones and such like - called J2ME (I think).

The "Standard" Java is called J2SE (remember the 'S' for standard.) This is probably what you want.

Now Sun realised that there were loads and loads of things they wanted to include *with* Java which werent that standard. They bundled them up and called them "Enterprise Edition" (aka J2EE). This includes java servlets (for websites) and most importantly this bollox technology for distributed computing called "Enterprise Java Beans" or EJB. Some people use "EJB" and J2EE interchangeably, but they are ignorant.

So if I dont mind the extra download time and disk space then I usually go for a J2EE distribution myself.

NOW the Java language itself went through a few releases. Version 1.1 is (I think) the only version you are supposed to expect for applets, but unless you have a reason not to then you should jump in straight for Java 1.5 or 1.6

I would also recommend downloading and using the Eclipse IDE ;-)

Goodluck!