Just in case anyone else gets caught: Apple’s “Software Update” is offering to update your Java to 1.4.2. After I ran the updater, JBuilder wouldn’t run; trying to run it from the Finder was causing one or two bounces on the Dock, followed by nothing.

Having been bitten by some JBuilder problems last time Apple revved their JDK, I knew at least one troubleshooting trick: open the terminal and execute this command:

$JBUILDER_HOME/bin/jbuilder -verbose <enter>
dyld: /Developer/Applications/JBuilder7/JBuilder.framework/bin/jbuilder can't open library: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.4.1/Libraries/libjvm_compat.dylib  (No such file or directory, errno = 2)
Trace/BPT trap

Note that $JBUILDER_HOME is not necessarily defined on your system, but it just means the JBuilder.framework directory which should be in the same directory as JBuilder.app

OK, so Apple’s habit of keeping old versions of Java around in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions seems to be intermittent at best; still, there was a simple fix:

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/
sudo ln -s 1.4.2 1.4.1

Sure enough, JBuilder launched. Hopefully I won’t suffer any horrible side effects. I guess I should catch up — JBuilder is up to version 10 by now — or switch to Eclipse. Then again, I don’t know that those don’t suffer the same problem!

I had a theory that the problem was that my JDK 1.4.1 definition had hard coded paths, but I moved some things around and still had the problem. I’m going to stick with the sym-link and hope it’s all I need.