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Building GWT on the Mac

Olivier Gérardin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:19:13 +0000

If you try to build the latest GWT from the svn repository on a Mac, you may end up with a bunch of errors like the following:

BUILD FAILED
/Users/ogerardin/Documents/GWT 2/trunk/build.xml:105: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/Users/ogerardin/Documents/GWT 2/trunk/build.xml:27: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/Users/ogerardin/Documents/GWT 2/trunk/build.xml:58: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/Users/ogerardin/Documents/GWT 2/trunk/platforms.ant.xml:36: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/Users/ogerardin/Documents/GWT 2/trunk/platforms.ant.xml:13: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/Users/ogerardin/Documents/GWT 2/trunk/dev/core/build.xml:192: The following error occurred while executing this line:
/Users/ogerardin/Documents/GWT 2/trunk/common.ant.xml:277: Non-zero status code result (1) running command: svn info

The last line indicates a problem with the “svn” command. The problem is that Mac’s builtin svn client is version 1.4.4 (wich you can check by typing “svn --version” in a terminal), but to build GWT, you need a newer svn client.

The steps to fix this are:

go to http://www.open.collab.net/downloads/community and download the latest subversion binaries for Mac OS X
you will get a disk image file; mount it and run the included installer. It will install to /opt/subversion/bin
edit your ~/.profile file to add the following line:

export PATH=/opt/subversion/bin:$PATH

start a new shell or type “. ~/.profile” to make sure the change is loaded in the current shell
type “svn --version” and check that the version is the latest one (1.6.5 as of today)
cd to your checked out GWT trunk directory, type “ant” and watch GWT build

GWT + Snow Leopard: fixed with GWT 1.7.1

Olivier Gérardin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:07:41 +0000

Google has just released GWT 1.7.1 to fix the issue I mentioned a few days ago regarding Snow Leopard compatibility.

In short, you can now run GWT on Snow Leopard using the Java command line argument -d32 without further modification. The GWT SDK no longer directs you to only use Java 5.

http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2009/09/gwt-171-release-fixes-mac-os-x-snow.html

Snow Leopard, Java 6 and GWT

Olivier Gérardin — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:55:41 +0000

Running GWT’s hosted mode on the Mac requires a 32 bit JVM, which under OS X 10.5 (Leopard) forces us to use Java 5, because Java 6 only has 64 bit libraries.

Problem: OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) removes all versions of Java but version 6. Fortunately, Java 6 now has a 32 bit mode, but it can’t be used straightforwardly for hosted mode because GWT insists on having Java 5…

So how do we get GWT’s hosted mode to run? Alex Moffat suggests an elegant solution:

Lombardi Development Blog » Blog Archive » Snow Leopard, Java 6 and GWT.