Installing Oracle SQL Developer 4.1 Early Adopter on Yosemite (Mac)

I typically use Java 7 for my dev environment. When I first tried to install  Oracle SQL Developer 4.1 Early Adopter  on top of Oracle SQL Developer 4.0 (dirty install) it asked me to upgrade to Java 8. On upgrading to Java 8 and updating my JAVA_HOME and product.conf to point to the new Java 8 I ran into a strange issue - SQL developer used to start and vanish - no log, no warning, no alerts.

Here is how I got it running

1. Download Oracle SQL Developer 4.1 Early Adopter 
2. Clean up existing SQL Developer settings:
• Move  ~/.sqldeveloper/ to another directory
• Delete Applications/SQLDeveloper (older version)
3. Move the downloaded SQL Developer 4.1 into Applications and replace the old SQL Developer
4. Start SQL Developer 4.1 and it will ask you to install Java 8 or above
5. Download and install Java 8. Configure your JAVA_HOME to point to the new jdk
• export JAVA_HOME=
  /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_25.jdk/Contents/Home  [You may not want to do this if you still want to use Java 7 for other apps]
• echo $JAVA_HOME  [To verify]
• java -version [To really really verify ]
6. Once it failed the launch in step 6 it will also create ~/.sqldeveloper/4.1.0/product.conf. Edit this file and change the setJavaHome line
• SetJavaHome /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_25.jdk/Contents/Home
7. Launch SQL Developer 4.1 !

There is still a bug in SQL Developer where the /Applications/SQLDeveloper-4.1.0.app/Contents/MacOS/sqldeveloper.sh  file says export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.7` when it is expected to run with Java 8!!

Note: I moved the ~/.sqldeveloper to another directory so that when SQL Developer starts for the first time it will ask you if you want to import the previous settings and you may choose the old sqldeveloper directory from this to get back previous preferences and connections.