GWT hosted mode on snow leopard

One of the first things I noticed after installing Snow Leopard was that GWT hosted mode no longer worked. You'll see the message "You must use a Java 1.5 runtime to use GWT Hosted Mode on Mac OS X." After spending about 10 minutes convincing myself that I was in fact using jdk1.5 for eclipse, ant, etc., and like, wasn't this working last week? I finally looked at the jdk symlinks in JavaVM.framework and figured out that 1.5 was just pointing to 1.6... interesting.

There was some discussion on the GWT group, along with a proposed fix of downloading someone's packaged leopard JDK and changing the symlinks. Not a great fix...

The Lombardi development team has come up with a great work-around.

I put together a jar with the modified BootStrapPlatform code (contains both .class and .java), or get just the src here.

Here are some step-by-step instructions for getting this working in Eclipse:

1. add the gwt-dev-mac-snow jar to your Java Build path.


2. in Java Build Path -> Order and Export, move the gwt-dev-mac-snow jar above the GWT SDK Library.


3. go to Run->Run Configurations. In Web Applications->(your GWT project), click on Arguments, then add -d32 under VM arguments.
   

That's it! You should now be able to run GWT hosted mode on Snow Leopard.

Growl Notifications for Ant

Most of our code is written in Java here at Bizo. This means we heavily rely on Ant for building, testing and packaging our applications.

Sometimes I found myself watching the scrolling terminal waiting for a build to complete. Other times, I left the terminal to go off and do some other task while the build was happening, only to realize some minutes later that my build was probably done. What I wanted was a way for Ant to notify me when the build was complete so I didn't have to stare at a terminal or forget about the build. What I wanted was Growl notifications from Ant!

If you don't know what Growl is you can read about it here. Its basically a notification API for Mac OSX and very widely supported and used (other applications that use it include Adium and Quicksilver for example). (BTW - All Bizo developers get Macs...)

Doing a little searching turned up this blog post. It was pretty easy to get this task integrated with our build system... And now, growl tells me when my build is done!