title: Difference between JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME
body: <p>I have a script that starts Tomcat and it looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>rem set JRE_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_03
  set JRE_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jre7\
  set CATALINA_HOME=D:\test\Server\apache-tomcat-6.0.18
  "%CATALINA_HOME%\bin\catalina.bat" jpda start
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I can set JRE_HOME to either my jre folder or my JDK folder and Tomcat will work, but if I remove JRE_HOME and use JAVA_HOME instead, Tomcat will only work if I give it the path to the JDK folder.</p>
  
  <p>So what is the difference between JRE and JAVA home, why does Tomcat behave in this manner?</p>