Nelz's Blog

For Widgetbox I was recently tasked with investigating a new Java memcached client called xmemcached.

Things were going smoothly (except that the xmemcached documentation is written mostly in Chinese)… But then I hit a bump in the road: the xmemcached JAR file was compiled for JDK 1.6.

Up until this point, all our code was using JDK 1.5, and we had only vague plans to eventually upgrade to JDK 1.6. Upon discussion, I’m just gonna work on the 1.6 stuff in a branch until we get the rest of the development team and operating environments up to a JDK 1.6 standard.

So, I went about upping my chosen JDK via the "Java Preferences" dialog.

Now, I saw something like this:

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_07"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_07-b06-153)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 1.6.0_07-b06-57, mixed mode)

Awesome. That’s exactly what I wanted!

But hold the phone, I was also getting this:

$ mvn -v
Maven version: 2.0.9
Java version: 1.5.0_16
OS name: "mac os x" version: "10.5.6" arch: "i386" Family: "unix"

So, I did some digging. With some hints, I found that the executable /usr/bin/mvn uses the symlink "CurrentJDK" to figure out which JDK to run, and the "Java Preferences" panel doesn’t update that when you change JDKs. (Dumb!)

So, here’s how I fixed it:

$ cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/
$ ls -la
...
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    5 Sep 29  2008 1.5 -> 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272 Feb 21  2008 1.5.0
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    5 Sep 29  2008 1.6 -> 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272 May  6  2008 1.6.0
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    3 May 12 18:18 CurrentJDK -> 1.5
...
$ sudo rm CurrentJDK
$ sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK

Now, I am seeing the environment I want:

$ ls -la
...
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    5 Sep 29  2008 1.5 -> 1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272 Feb 21  2008 1.5.0
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    5 Sep 29  2008 1.6 -> 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x   8 root  wheel  272 May  6  2008 1.6.0
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel    3 May 12 18:18 CurrentJDK -> 1.6
...
$ mvn -v
Maven version: 2.0.9
Java version: 1.6.0_07
OS name: "mac os x" version: "10.5.6" arch: "x86_64" Family: "mac"