JVM and Flex Don’t Play Nice

// August 22nd, 2008 // Flex, Programming

I ran across an interesting problem today. I tried to create a new workspace with the intent of cleaning up my Flex environment. It’s getting pretty cluttered between client work and personal projects and random experiments. So I hit Switch Workspace / Other and type in the name of a location that doesn’t exist yet, assuming it would go ahead and create that Experiments folder for me. Which it did, right as Flex went down in flames.

Every time I try opening Flex Builder up again, I was immediately met with a daunting error. JVM Terminated! All from switching my workspace? Obviously this isn’t normal behavior. A week ago, I was required to change my machine’s version of Java SDK to work with a simulator required for my current project. The computer was using what seemed to be a special version of 1.5, and the simulator app required 1.6. In OS X, there is a sym link at /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions called Current. Originally, that was pointing at something called A, and I don’t know what that means, because in the same directory there’s also the 1.5 sdk, and they look pretty much the same. That was switched to 1.6.0 and the simulator worked. I switched (and when I say “I” here, I mean our resident Java guy) that sym link from 1.6 back to 1.5, still getting the error. Then I switched it back to A, and all is well.

So! Lesson learned. Flex Builder will give me problems if I mess with Java. Seems like kind of a bad thing, though, if ever I want to do any Java programming, right?

Leave a Reply