Your problems are caused by the Project Jigsaw changes that went into the Java 9 EA build you seem to have used. JEP 220 describes them. The section Removed: rt.jar and tools.jar describes this in more detail but Risks and Assumptions contains a good summary: JDK and JRE images will, as noted above, no longer … Read more
That’s what profiles are for, extract the path to a property, setup profiles for windows, OSX, etc, and define the property values appropriately. Here’s the doc page that discussing profiles for OSes: Maven Local Settings Model It should endup looking something like this: <profiles> <profile> <id>windows_profile</id> <activation> <os> <family>Windows</family> </os> </activation> <properties> <toolsjar>${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar</toolsjar> </properties> </profile> … Read more
Yes, you’ve downloaded and installed the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) instead of the Java Development Kit (JDK). The latter has the tools.jar, java.exe, javac.exe, etc.