This section describes the steps you need to take before you can write or run programs that use the JDBC interface.
Precompiled versions of the driver can be downloaded from the PostgreSQL™ JDBC web site.
These instructions are currently inaccurate.Alternatively you can build the driver from source, but you should only need to do this if you are making changes to the source code. To build the JDBC driver, you need Ant 1.5 or higher and a JDK. Ant is a special tool for building Java-based packages. It can be downloaded from the Ant web site.
If you have several Java compilers installed, it depends on the Ant configuration which one gets used. Precompiled Ant distributions are typically set up to read a file .antrc in the current user's home directory for configuration. For example, to use a different JDK than the default, this may work:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/sun-jdk1.3 JAVACMD=$JAVA_HOME/bin/java
Do not try to build the driver by calling ant or even javac directly. This will not work. Run gmake normally as described below.
After installation, the driver should be found in PREFIX/share/java/postgresql.jar. The resulting driver will be built for the version of Java you are running. If you build with a 1.1 JDK you will build a version that supports the JDBC 1 specification, if you build with a 1.2 or 1.3 JDK you will build a version that supports the JDBC 2 specification, and finally if you build with a 1.4 JDK you will build a version that supports the JDBC 3 specification.