Question

I’m trying to get the new 1.7 JDK working with Eclipse (this is Oracle’s official release).

I don’t mean just pointing Eclipse to it so you can use it in projects, this works fine, but actually making Eclipse run using the 1.7 JVM.

I’ve moved the new JVM to the top of the list in Java Preferences, but Eclipse still starts with 1.6. If I disable 1.6 in Java Preferences I get a dialog immediately after I double-click on Eclipse saying “Failed to create the Java Virtual Machine”.

edit: I added the following to my eclipse.ini just before the -vmargs:

-vm
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java

Yet in the Eclipse installation details dialog I still see:

java.runtime.version=1.6.0_31-b04-415-11M3646

edit 2: here are the contents of my eclipse.ini file: https://gist.github.com/2512578

Answer 1

I just added my comment to https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=339788 regarding the inability to use the new Oracle JDK with Eclipse on OS X. Using the -vm option inside eclipse.ini does not work. The only way I found to work around this was to use the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh
#
export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.7.0.jdk/Contents/Home
LAUNCHER_JAR=/Applications/eclipse/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar

java \
-showversion \
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m \
-Xms1024m \
-Xmx1024m \
-Xdock:icon=/Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/Resources/Eclipse.icns \
-XstartOnFirstThread \
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts \
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5 \
-jar $LAUNCHER_JAR

Using the steps on http://mathiasbynens.be/notes/shell-script-mac-apps, I turned the script above into an application that I can keep on my dock.