tools.jar workaround on Mac OS X?

[Erik Hentell]

I just got my first Powerbook a couple weeks back, and wanted to play
around with the some alternative languages for the Java VM. I tried
to use Kawa, Netrexx, and a couple other languages, but I discovered
that tools.jar doesn't exist in Mac OS X. Instead everything is in
classes.jar, and it seems to be messing up the process of actually
compiling these languages to bytecodes.

Is there a workaround for something like this? I realize the obvious
answer is to just use the standard Java language, but I'm also
wondering if this has an effect on other Java projects that people
might want to use on OS X (Jboss, Eclipse, etc)

Thanks in advance,
Erik

 

[Scott Ellsworth]

I just got my first Powerbook a couple weeks back, and wanted to play
around with the some alternative languages for the Java VM. I tried
to use Kawa, Netrexx, and a couple other languages, but I discovered
that tools.jar doesn't exist in Mac OS X. Instead everything is in
classes.jar, and it seems to be messing up the process of actually
compiling these languages to bytecodes.

Look carefully for error messages. Such error messages might indicate
how they were looking, and thus what you need to do to make them happy.

One possibility: try creating an empty jar named tools.jar in JAVA_HOME.
Programs searching for tools.jar often also demand JAVA_HOME be set
despite it usually being superfluous.

If the alternate language authors are actually demanding that the
classes in question exist in tools.jar, rather than just doing a
getResource to find them, they likely need to be smacked. I seem to
recall that there are a few edge cases where this makes sense, but
usually, allowing the system bootclasspath to do its thing is adequate.

Is there a workaround for something like this? I realize the obvious
answer is to just use the standard Java language, but I'm also
wondering if this has an effect on other Java projects that people
might want to use on OS X (Jboss, Eclipse, etc)

Has not been a problem for me with Eclipse, IDEA, the built in Tomcat
(whose startup.sh I looked at to get the one from Apache working).

Scott