Gerry McLarnon

The development environment is based on Mac OS X, Eclipse 4.2 (Juno) for Java development and Google Chrome with the JSONView plugin for JavaScript debugging.

One of the challenges was to replicate the technical architecture of the production environment in the development environment. Installing Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat and MySQL was a skoosh but mod_jk on OS X was a different issue. In fact I had problems with the subversion plugin for Eclipse 4.2 and upgrading from Eclipse 3.6 to 4.2.

mod_jk
No easy download and install for mod_jk on Mac OS X, oh no you have to get the source code and build it your self. After downloading the mod_jk source …

cd tomcat-connectors-1.2.37-src
./configure --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs
cd native/
./configure --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs
CFLAGS='-arch i386 -arch x86_64' APXSLDFLAGS=' -arch i386 -arch x86_64' ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs
sudo make install

And bish, bash, bosh I had a /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_jk.so

Eclipse 3.6 to 4.2 upgrade
Upgrading from Eclipse 3.6 to 4.2 didn’t work, but I put that down to the Flex plug-in. I gave up on that upgrade and installed a new 4.2 version and backed out the upgrade on 3.6 with the wonders of Time Machine. I need the 3.6 version to support the Flex apps I’ve built with Eclipse 3.6. I have an elephants graveyard eclipse versions on my machine.

Unfortunately the 4.2 Juno release initially ran like a dog. It would take several seconds to just open a file, I’m not the only one to experience this problem. Increasing the memory allocation in the eclipse.ini file soon sorted this problem though…

-Xms1024m
-Xmx2048m
-Xss2m

Subversion plugin
Using the subversion plugin from  Eclipse 4.2 on Mac OS X also needed a bit of work, this time having to install subversion and a load of other Darwin port stuff. The magic that worked for me was…

sudo port install subversion-javahlbindings +no_bdb +universal
sudo port -f activate subversion-javahlbindings