If like me you are stuck with a bunch of 32bit Mac or just want to play with JDK 7 on your 64bit intel mac then you might like to consider building the OpenJDK version from source. This will get you a X11 based version of Java; but it will do the trick for most purposes.
Before you start the instructions here you might like to make sure you have the following dependencies:
- X11, the installer is on your OS install disks
- XCode, about a gig download required for mac and a bunch of header files.
- MatPorts, so you can download and install mercurial
- SoyLatte 1.0.3, so you can boot strap the build process. Not required if Apple has bless you machine with its own JDK.
The entire process should take around 3-4 hours including downloading all the bits and not paying attention. Future rebuild should only take around ten minutes. Couple of things I tripped up on though: "fclone" is not a typo it is an extension to mercurial added by the previous step; and when copying build.sh from the wiki page you might find you end up with spaces after the "\" line separators. Remove them will a tool of your choice.
Now one of the reasons I was doing this was so I could run the latest version of JDeveloper on my Mac, I am still having trouble getting the installer to run due to it incorrectly claiming I have disk space issues. I am working on a solution for that. I am using JDK 7 as this is where are the development is at so in many ways it is more capable and stable than the aging SoyLatte 1.0.3 build.
