Running Cairngen on a Mac

I've been using Cairngen for a while on my PC and it works great. It is a huge time saver for building Cairngorm based Flex applications. When I tried using it on my MacBook Pro, I found out that it's not quite as straight forward. There is a comprehensive discussion on the problem at Eric Feminella's blog (creator of Cairngen) which was a huge help. The issue is that Cairngen requires Java 6 which doesn't exist yet (officially) for OSX. You can get around this by downloading a few libraries and including them in your Ant classpath.

Here's what I had to do to get Cairngen running on OSX 10.4 / Eclipse 3.3.2. I'm assuming it would work for 10.5 too, but I haven't tested it.

  1. Download the following jars:
  2. I placed the jars in the Ant lib folder in my Eclipse installation: eclipse/plugins/org.apache.ant_1.7.0.../lib
  3. Go to Eclipse->Preferences->Ant->Runtime->Classpath, select "Ant Home Entries" and add the three jars using the "Add External JARs..." button.

That's it. Hope you don't have to waste as much time figuring this out as I did!

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Running Cairngen on a Mac,” an entry by Ryan Phelan

Published:
04.12.08 / 9pm
Category:
Design, Eclipse, Flex, Flex Builder, Workflow