JAVA_HOME setting on MacOS

I just downloaded the latest Java Update 1.7.09 for MacOS and installed it. And as usual, I had to fix the JAVA_HOME environmental property, so that all my Maven etc. tools still worked properly. In ~/.bash_profile, I added/updated following entries:

export JAVA_HOME6=/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home
export JAVA_HOME7=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_09.jdk/Contents/Home
export JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME7
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

I use JAVA_HOME6 and JAVA_HOME7 so that I can easily switch the standard Java version.

But, stop, stop, there must be a better way to do that, so that I don't have to update these lines after every Java download. And actually it is by using the not-so-well-known-but-very-useful command java_home:

The java_home command returns a path suitable for setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable. It determines this path from the user's enabled and preferred JVMs in the Java Preferences application. Additional constraints may be provided to filter the list of JVMs available. [...] The path is printed to standard output.

On my machine, java_home prints following path to the STDOUT:

[561]% /usr/libexec/java_home --version 1.7
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_09.jdk/Contents/Home

So, I can change my .bash_profile as follows:

export JAVA_HOME6=`/usr/libexec/java_home --version 1.6`
export JAVA_HOME7=`/usr/libexec/java_home --version 1.7`
export JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_HOME7
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

On my machine, my Java environmental parameters becomes:

[555]% env | grep JAVA
JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_09.jdk/Contents/Home
JAVA_HOME6=/System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home
JAVA_HOME7=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_09.jdk/Contents/Home

Finito.