I found that the build instructions don't work if you try to build Derby using IBM's SDKs. You can build successfully without changing Derby but you need one more setting in your ant.properties.
The issue is that IBM's 1.4 SDK does not contain rt.jar which the Derby build expects, so you need to override the Jdk14 compile path as follows (or similar) in your ant.properties. j14lib=c:/ibm142/jre/lib j13lib=c:/ibm131/jre/lib java14compile.classpath=c:/ibm142/jre/lib/core.jar;c:/ibm142/jre/lib/server.jar Note that ant didn't seem to expand variables in this file, so I couldn't use ${j14lib} when setting the JDK 14 classpath. A similar setting might also be needed for other Java SDKs. Dan.