Saturday, July 17, 2010

Eclipse Helios and Java 1.6u21 deadlocks

I wanted to write a post about the new Eclipse Helios, which was just released to participate in the Helios Blogathon. So, on my personal machine, I installed the newest JDK (1.6u21), the new eclipse, started it up, tried to work with it and after a few seconds.... It just hangs!

But whait - it worked nicely on my work machine, so what's the deal? Did I install the wrong plug-ins? Tried to open up the wrong editor? I had the same problem on my work machine (Windows 7 x64 with the newest Java 64 bit (1.6u21)). On this machine I fixed it using the 32 bit Java version instead (which just happend to be 1.6u20).

After spending several hours with several 32 and 64 bit versions of Eclipse and Java, I found the deadly combination. It is:

  • Windows 7 x64 (may be unrelated to the problem)
  • Java 1.6 u 21
  • Eclipse Helios

The fix? Get an older Java Version - which is not simple - if you try to get an older version of Java, Oracle asks you to register and wants your email address. They don't tell you that there is a public archive of older Java versions. Why should they? You always want the latest version, right? Even if this means your Eclipse Helios session is limited to 5 seconds.

Helios now runs fine on an Jdk 1.5, with a separate JDK 1.6 installed to actually run my apps.


Update: 11 days after my post Slashdot has some more information: Oracles Java Company Change Breaks Eclipse. Also, there is Bug 6969236.


3 comments:

  1. So far my Ubuntu 9.10 still runs java6u20, so thanks for the heads-up (mental note: Should add an exception in /apt/sources.list) Too bad, Oracle wants to brand everything for themselves... :/ Also, I really dislike their fonts and the Java API has become incredibly slow ever since it's delivered from Oracle's servers. But enough ranting.

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  2. You don't have to register for downloading older Java versions. Registration is optional.

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