[r] Using the rJava package on Win7 64 bit with R

Getting rJava to work depends heavily on your computers configuration:

  1. You have to use the same 32bit or 64bit version for both: R and JDK/JRE. A mixture of this will never work (at least for me).
  2. If you use 64bit version make sure, that you do not set JAVA_HOME as a enviorment variable. If this variable is set, rJava will not work for whatever reason (at least for me). You can check easily within R is JAVA_HOME is set with

    Sys.getenv("JAVA_HOME")
    

If you need to have JAVA_HOME set (e.g. you need it for maven or something else), you could deactivate it within your R-session with the following code before loading rJava:

if (Sys.getenv("JAVA_HOME")!="")
  Sys.setenv(JAVA_HOME="")
library(rJava)

This should do the trick in most cases. Furthermore this will fix issue Using the rJava package on Win7 64 bit with R, too. I borrowed the idea of unsetting the enviorment variable from R: rJava package install failing.