Thursday, November 20, 2014

Setting up Eclipse and Google Plugin on Mac Book (Mavericks)

As the new owner of a Mac Book Pro (note I didn't say "proud" there) I thought I'd dust off my Eclipse skills and see how it works out as a development platform.
Installed both Eclipse and the Google Plugin for Eclipse, but the latter wasn't working properly and I couldn't see any of the Google project types or features when running Eclipse.
I found some pages on stackoverflow which talked about creating a little shell script to start Eclipse, but then found a simpler instruction to edit the ~/.profile and change the JAVA_HOME variable - old skool 'nix - love it!
I used a terminal and did vi ~/.profile 
...to add export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.xxx.jdk/Contents/Home
export JRE_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.xxx.jdk/Contents/Home
Help > ... Show Configuration shows that Eclipse is indeed running the new JDK and the Google plugin items all come up just fine.  Happy days.
On to the GWT tutorial now - what could possibly go wrong!

(Edit - also seem to have to identify the 1.7 JRE/JDK to Eclipse and then use them in the project BEFORE creating the project - that's what went wrong.)