[Update: Changed the title, added "on a Mac" because everything mentioned here is applicable to that platform alone]

After not looking at it for 4 years, today I started playing with Java again for a new open source project called RedCar, a programmers text editor that is now being ported to SWT and JRuby. Mat is getting pretty involved in it and he got me curious about the project. However to actually get it to work I had to get the Java 1.6 code to compile on my Mac which was a little tricky. Here are some notes from that.

The JDK 1.6 was part of one of the recent Mac Software updates but what I found out was that the update does not actually change the default JDK/JRE for the system. The first thing I did was to change the symlinks for java and javac as mentioned on this post. That seemed to work and calling java – version and javac -version seemed to return the correct versions, but running the build file still did not work. After a few other attempts, including trying the Java Preferences Application without any luck, I finally found this post that basically talked about the CurrentJDK symlink that apparently my build.xml was using (and was still pointed to JDK 1.5). That seems to have worked.

One last thing. Apparently Eclipse (and Flex Builder which is built on top of Eclipse) doesnt work with Java 1.6 on a Mac. As this post suggests, you may have to make a change to the Info.plist for the application to make it run with Java 1.5.

[Update] The Flash CS3 IDE doesnt work with 1.6 as well, so I am reverting back to 1.5 for the time being.