2019 is coming to a close, and this quick guide will get your JRE cleared up for the next decade

Starting in 2018, Oracle began charging for Java SDK and JRE licenses for business use.

If you as a freelancer or your company, are using the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), but not the Java Development Kit(JDK), you may have been unaware of this change. Not to worry, multiple companies and projects are offering compatible versions of JRE and JDK.

The main player in this space is the OpenJDK project, but there are others including Amazon Coronetto, which we'll walk through using today.

To download the latest version of Amazon Coretto's JRE 8 head to this link.

From that page download the zip file that corresponds with your version of Windows, either x64 or x86. Most people need x64 but if you don't know which to choose, here's how to find out.

Going forward the instructions will be for x64, but should be very similar if you chose x86.

Extract the zip file to C:\Program Files\Java, this will extract a folder named jre8.

Now go to your Start Menu, and find Java, and then choose Configure Java.

It will open a window, and you should then choose the third tab that says Java.

Then click the View button.

On the next window under User choose Find.

Navigate to C:\Program Files\Java\jre8\ then choose Next and it should find bin\javaw.exe, and then choose Finish.

Back on the View Window, unclick the older Oracle JRE versions.

Choose Ok.

You can then test using a Java applet or program, to see if the JRE is working.

Hopefully this document helps you out, if you have any questions feel free to find me on Twitter @camofclay.