Recently we’ve had a few questions about JRules support for Apple Mac OS X. The official line is that this is an unsupported platform, however with a few tweaks you can install and run the Linux version of JRules 6.7.1 on Mac OS X.

Unsupported Platforms

So what is an “unsupported platform”? Basically it means that our QA department does not test this platform. To contrast with a supported platform, for most of the supported platforms we have developers that actively use the platform as a day-to-day development environment. We run our nightly battery of unit tests on the supported platforms and we have a lot of in-house experience with the platforms, including within our tier-1 support and product experts. If you call customer support and you are using an unsupported platform unsurprisingly the first request will be to reproduce the problem on a supported platform.

Mac OS X is becoming a more popular environment for developers, though still niche compared to Linux or Windows. I recently installed JRules 6.7.1 on Mac OS X 10.5.3 (Intel) so I thought it might be useful to document the process.

1. Download and Install Eclipse 3.3.x for Mac OS X

You want the “Eclipse Classic 3.3.2 - Mac OS X (137 MB)” distro.

2. Install BIRT and DTP

Launch Eclipse and use the Eclipse Update Manager to install BIRT and the DTP Extender SDK from the Europa Discovery Update Site.

3. Download jrules671.bin

Download the Linux version of the JRules installer.

4. Run Installer

Open a Terminal window and type “bash jrules671.bin”. Complete the installation but select “/Applications/jrules671″ as the installation directory rather than the default. After installation is complete JRules will have been installed under “/Applications/jrules671/ILOG JRules 6.7.1″. The spaces in the path name will cause JBoss problems so you need to move the entire contents of the “ILOG JRules 6.7.1″ folder up one level to “/Applications/jrules671″ and delete the “ILOG JRules 6.7.1″ folder. Everything you installed should now be under “/Applications/jrules671″.

After moving your JRules install to “/Application/jrules671″ you also need to open the file “ECLIPSE_HOME/links/ilog.rules.studio.link” and replace the link with:

#Rule Studio Link to Eclipse Install
#Fri Jun 20 14:28:55 CEST 2008
path=/Applications/jrules671/studio

5. Increase JVM MaxPermSize

Open the file “/Applications/jrules671/shared/bin/build.xml” in a text editor. Replace the “jvm.permgen.flag” section with this:

<!-- Extends the default MaxPermSize if running on a Sun or Apple JVM -->
<condition property="jvm.permgen.flag" value="-XX:MaxPermSize=128m">
  <or>
	<equals arg1="${java.vendor}" arg2="Sun Microsystems Inc." />
	<equals arg1="${java.vendor}" arg2="Apple Inc." />
  </or>
</condition>

6. Launch the Sample Console

To launch the Samples Console and the various JRules modules you can use “/Applications/jrules671/shared/bin/build.xml”. Open a Terminal window and type: “ant samples.console”. You should see the Samples Console window appear and JBoss will launch with RTS, RES and RSM deployed. There should not be any errors in the Server trace panel.

7. Test Rule Studio, Rule Team Server and Rule Execution Server

Once JBoss has booted you can navigate to http://localhost:8080/bres and http://localhost:8080/teamserver to test the installation. You can run Rule Studio by executing the Eclipse from step 1.

Conclusions

I hope you found these tips useful. If you have corrections or any of your own tips to add please send them through the comments!

Tags: Install, Mac OS X

Posted by Daniel Selman in JRules. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.