Recent changes to 330: New drjava beta app won't launch - damaged

#330 New drjava beta app won't launch - damaged

Alex Jacoby — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 04:26:26 -0000

I would second what Hal said. As a teaching tool, I think it's preferable for new programmers if they can just download and run the application without worrying about the command line right away (or the gatekeeper warning for that matter, but that's a smaller hurdle).

Thanks for all the great work,
Alex

#330 New drjava beta app won't launch - damaged

hperkins — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:48:45 -0000

(This was sent via email but didn't get cc'd here because of some email permission problem. So posting a copy to get everything in one place)

Hi Corky -

Good to hear from you.

I suspect that the launcher version is exactly the problem. The warning I'm getting is basically "this application is broken and can't be launched". That's different from the gatekeeper warning about unsigned apps, which can be solved by right-clicking the app to launch it manually and selecting the correct option to launch it without a warning in the future. I'm not seeing that one, and I can't seem to force it to happen so I can approve the app and get past any gatekeeper issues.

What I'd suggest is either to update the OS X app to use the oracle launcher, or, if that's not possible in time, don't ship the OS X app this time around and tell OS X people to download the jar file and double-click it to run DrJava, which does work. Given that DrJava is moving past Java 6 (hooray!) and that Java 7 or 8 requires Oracle Java on the Mac, it's likely that few people would even have the Apple Java 6 installed, and apparently things aren't working even if it is. (Maybe the class file version(s) in the compiled code is(are) too recent for the Java 6 launcher?)

I'm not sure of the entire history between Apple and Oracle. What I do remember in the early days is that Apple wanted complete control of everything Java and rolled their own, with their own non-standard, non-unix directory structure, but at least at the technical levels they were trading info with Sun. Several years ago in roughly the Java 5 or 6 era, Steve Jobs and Larry Elison decided it was crazy for Apple to be an outlier and that it made sense for Oracle to ship Java on all platforms, which is how Apple decided to abandon Java and let Oracle pick it up. Of course one difference is that apple had switched to OS X by then, which is a unix and close enough to regular Unix/Linux systems that it didn't require a completely different setup as on the old classic Mac OS.

At least in the last several years, the openjdk and Oracle releases have seemed to track quite closely since, as I understand it, almost the entire code base is now the openjdk one and is shared between them. Usually the major linux distros release updates to match new versions from Oracle within a few days or a couple of weeks at the most. I don't know what the app launcher grubbies look like, so maybe at that level there are bigger Oracle vs OS X differences.

Anyway, that's my 2 pence from the left coast. If you can, update to use the Java 7/8 launcher on mac os x, otherwise just ship the jar without the app if there's not enough time. I think that shipping code that tries to use the old Apple Java 6 launcher is going to be nothing but a headache. Even if you can make it work, it would require downloading the Apple Java 6 shim and installing that, something that a lot of people probably won't want to do, and likely will increase your bug report/support headache.

Hope that helps. Thanks for keeping things going after all these years.

Cheers

Hal

#330 New drjava beta app won't launch - damaged

hperkins — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 19:40:23 -0000

One additional thing that might be useful: this particular laptop has two JVMs installed: the latest Oracle one and the old Apple Java 6 (https://support.apple.com/kb/dl1572?locale=en_US):

$ pwd; ls -l
/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jul 14 2015 1.6.0.jdk
drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Jul 20 17:50 jdk1.8.0_102.jdk

The Java 6 one is needed to launch some of the old Adobe CS6 applications like DreamWeaver. But the Oracle one is the one that is the default in the terminal and eclipse, and is also the one that DrJava uses when it is launched from the terminal window. Both VMs do show up in DrJava's popup window. I haven't tried selecting the Java 6 one and doing anything with it - with luck it is basically ignored.

New drjava beta app won't launch - damaged

hperkins — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 18:51:45 -0000

I just downloaded the new beta (drjava-beta-20160913-225446-osx.tar.gz) on OS X 10.11.6, unpacked it (tar xzf), copied the application to /Applications and tried to launch it. The finder says "the application is damaged" and won't launch it.

If I cd into the application and lunch it from a terminal window it starts up and seems to be ok:

DrJava.app/Contents/Resources/Java $ java -jar drjava.jar

Any idea what's wrong when trying to launch it via the regular application?

Thanks

Hal