Developing with Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3

In October, Apple released for OS X  their latest update of Java.  (There was this whole hoopla about whether or not Java would cease to exist on OS X, but then Apple announced that it would be releasing much of its source code to OpenJDK -- discussions around that are not the topic of this blog post.)

One of the side-effects of that release was that Apple decided to move around several of its directories (some have supposed this would allow third-party releases of the JDK to be installed more easily).  In any case, if you are like me, you constantly look to the source code of the JDK to understand what is happening in things like java.util.HashMap, java.lang.String, etc.  Before, there was a classes.jar file you could find things in.  Now, they changed it to a src.jar file.  On my system, I did the following in the commandline:

liferay 12:10:31 ~> find /System/Library/Java /System/Library/Frameworks /Library/Java -name src.jar

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0_22-b04-307.jdk/Contents/Home/src.jar

 
If you don't find that, you may have to install the Developer Package for the update from Apple's developer connect site (why you have to install it separately now, is beyond me).  You can then attach this jar in Eclipse or whatever IDE to navigate through the JDK source.

Incidentally, if you are interested in the javadocs, there are appledocs.jar and docs.jar that can be found in the same directory.

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