a. JDK 1.7 Install this from the standard place at Oracle. We're using J2EE 6. b. Weblogic 12.1.2 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/overview/index.html set JAVA_HOME="c:\Program Files\Java\jdb1.7.0_60" (can do this temporarily in the current cmd session) configure.cmd I set the username/pwd to cs342/bjarne27 (but I never seem to need this) c. OracleXE 11g http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/index.htm Set the service to "Manual" so that it doesn't use up Windows system resources when it's not needed. Start/Stop manually using the standard "Start" and "Stop" Oracle utilities. d. OEPE 12.1.2.4 http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/eclipse/overview/index.html Configure OEPE to use JDK by configuring eclipse.ini: Add: -vm C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_60\bin Explanation: http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/obe/jdev/obe11jdev/11/oepe11g/introeclipseide.htm Useful plugins JSF Webpage editor MercurialEclipse, see https://bitbucket.org/mercurialeclipse/main/wiki/Home Papyrus UML editor, see http://download.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/papyrus/updates/releases/kepler e. Curl I added this to the system path. f. EclipseLink Download JAXB support from http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/downloads/ I have EclipseLink 2.5.0 at home, so I dug up the older version. EclipseLink 2.5.2 appears to work as well. To save on network login latency in the lab, I moved this library to c:\program files. This required loading all 10 jar files into the eclipse "user library". Load it into "Program Files"/EclipseLink... Occasionally, I got the error: "The currently selected JAXB library provider is invalid." Fixed this by resetting the connection in the JPA properties, which must have gotten un-set in the library upgrade operation. g. Eclipse NoSQL The EclipseLink NoSQL jars need to be copied to Program Files and included as external jars in the project build path.