Fine tuning Eclipse to work with Leopard

We've been using Eclipse to build multiplatform applications but things are broken on the Mac now that Apple has released Leopard and people are upgrading from Tiger. What changes are required in an Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) application to get it working correctly again on both Tiger and Leopard?

A real good place to find help with these issues is the SWT newsgroup. There are a number of issues with Eclipse and Leopard. Eclipse is based on SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), which uses the Carbon API’s on the Mac. Leopard is the beginning of the end for the Mac Carbon API’s. Everything is moving to Cocoa API’s on the Mac. Another good source of information about SWT development in Eclipse is Steve Northover’s blog. Northover is the leader of the Eclipse SWT development team. There is also a development mailing list available called platform-dev-swt that you can subscribe to. Unfortunately there is not a lot you can do now in your RCP application to overcome the difficulties the SWT has with Leopard, other than get involved with the SWT development efforts and help fix the issues that impact your applications. The SWT team itself seems to be leaving Macintosh SWT development to the “community.” (Read the Nov. 17, 2007 post.) This makes it sound like Eclipse may not be a good choice for multiplatform application delivery if your target audience includes significant numbers of Macintosh clients, unless you have the Cocoa skills and time to contribute to the community development work. At the very least you will want to monitor the progress so that you can make informed decisions.

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We've been using Eclipse to build multiplatform applications but things are broken on the Mac now that Apple has released Leopard and people are upgrading from Tiger. What changes are required in an Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) application to get it working correctly again on both Tiger and Leopard?

A real good place to find help with these issues is the SWT newsgroup. There are a number of issues with Eclipse and Leopard. Eclipse is based on SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), which uses the Carbon API’s on the Mac. Leopard is the beginning of the end for the Mac Carbon API’s. Everything is moving to Cocoa API’s on the Mac. Another good source of information about SWT development in Eclipse is Steve Northover’s blog. Northover is the leader of the Eclipse SWT development team. There is also a development mailing list available called platform-dev-swt that you can subscribe to. Unfortunately there is not a lot you can do now in your RCP application to overcome the difficulties the SWT has with Leopard, other than get involved with the SWT development efforts and help fix the issues that impact your applications. The SWT team itself seems to be leaving Macintosh SWT development to the “community.” (Read the Nov. 17, 2007 post.) This makes it sound like Eclipse may not be a good choice for multiplatform application delivery if your target audience includes significant numbers of Macintosh clients, unless you have the Cocoa skills and time to contribute to the community development work. At the very least you will want to monitor the progress so that you can make informed decisions.

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