Trouble Shooting Oracle JDeveloper 10g on Mac OS X

Written by Gerard Davison, Oracle Corporation
April, 2004

Introduction

Important Note: Oracle JDeveloper 10g(10.1.2) is now certified on Mac OS/X. This document was created for older versions of JDeveloper that weren't officially certified.

Although Mac OS X is not yet a supported platform for JDeveloper 10g many people have successfully been using it to develop applications. As long as you have Panther and JDK 1.4.2 installed you should be able to get quite far along before you run into any problems. Here are some problems you might run into along with the workarounds for them.

Problems and Workarounds

Apple-Q quits JDeveloper without saving

To fix this use the "Check For Updates" menu on the Help menu to download the "JDeveloper on OSX Helper Addin".

Where is Java

When JDeveloper starts for the first time, it asks you for the correct path for java. This is simply "/usr" and you don't need to worry about finding the correct path in the Libraries folder.

Have to start JDeveloper from the command line

As Oracle JDeveloper 10g wasn't officially release for the Mac, we haven't provided a one-click application. I have heard that people have tried to retrofit the code into that we provided for the 903 Mac preview with little success.

One problem is that Finder doesn't know how to run basic shell executables. You can fix this by renaming "jdev" to "jdev.command". This will then be at least doube-clickable and you can drag a shortcut to your desktop.

Deprecation warnings at startup

A minor issue logged as bug 3525179, that is caused by using some old preferences. You get the following trace out on the console:

com.apple.macosx.AntiAliasedGraphicsOn has been deprecated. Please switch to apple.awt.Antialiasing.
com.apple.macosx.AntiAliasedTextOn has been deprecated. Please switch to apple.awt.TextAntialiasing.
com.apple.macosx.AntiAliasedGraphicsOn has been deprecated. Please switch to apple.awt.Antialiasing.

The workaround for this is to edit jdev-Darwin.conf, which can be found in the jdev\bin directory and substitute the values. Note there are only two values to replace - not three as it would first appear.

Hardward Acceleration is disabled

In previous version of Java for the mac we had to disable Hardward Acceleration otherwise any code that used XOR functions would fail. I believe that this has been resolved now so you can give JDeveloper a little bit of a speed up by editing jdev-Dawin.conf again. Comment out the following line:

AddVMOption -Dcom.apple.hwaccel=false

I can't type { nor } on non US/UK keyboard

This is a problem that the ALT-SHIFT combinations, used on many keyboards, is mapped to something else in the editor. To fix this problem you need to go to Tools->Preferences->Accelerators and set Catageory to be "Window". You then need to remove the accelerators assigned to all the "Assign to Alt..." actions.
You should then be able to type the alternative characters.

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