How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eclipse

How? I’m not here to tell you… because I don’t know yet, besides, this is not about Eclipse.

If you’ve spent the last week trying to make WebObjects+WOLips+Eclipse work on Ubuntu, like me, you’ve probably already tried following guides like this one, or this. After a while you find yourself staring at WOLips in Eclipse wondering why the frak does it not recognize all these delicious WebObjects frameworks you freshly extracted from XCode 2.5 with a 17″ Powerbook G4 that is still running good old 10.3.9. This might solve your problem…

This applies to: Ubuntu 8.04, Eclipse 3.3.2 w/ Java-1.5.0-sun, WOLips 3.3.5193, WebObjects 5.3.3 

If you open a few of the framework packages inside System/Library/Frameworks/ (they are really just folders), you’ll notice some of them have the directory:

DeliciousWebObjects.framework/Resources

DeliciousWebObjects.framework/WebServerResources

You might have noticed that these Are the frameworks that actually show up in WOLips. Now look at other ones, you see these have a different structure, instead of the above two folders, you got:

AtrociousJDBC.framework/Versions/A/

then within folder A/ you find the regular:

AtrociousJDBC.framework/Versions/A/Resources

AtrociousJDBC.framework/Versions/A/WebServerResources

Strange eh? Did the different structure confuse WOLips? Now if you are curious, go back to that powerbook and look at the original frameworks on OS X, you’ll see there are softlinks at root of framework folder that point to Resources and WebServerResources directly.

To what purpose Apple decided to package their frameworks this way I have little clue, but after you copied it from OS X (HFS+) to Ubuntu (ext3 I think), the softlinks are, after some file system shuffling, all gone, rendering the framework beyond recognition to WOLips. At this point the solution is obvious, move the resources folders back to the root of framework, or remake all the softlinks.

After you did that, WOLips will happily load the frameworks, and you can finally build WebObjects Hello World app, and go on resolving references in Web-CAT sources…

~ Qi