Black preview in GWT Designer in Eclipse on Ubuntu

Unfortunatly there’s a small snag when you’re using GWT designer on ubuntu with the libwebkit libs. When libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.2 isn’t found, the GWT designer will display a black field when you’re editing gui items, as shown on the example below:

GWT Designer on Ubuntu

You can easily solve this by symbolic linking to the already existing libwebkit library. Only execute the commands which are shown in bold:

joris@dipshit:~$ cd /usr/lib
joris@dipshit:/usr/lib$ ls -lhatr |grep libwebkit
-rw-r--r--   1 root root       19M 2011-04-20 14:52 libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0.6.0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root        25 2011-08-12 19:14 libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 -> libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0.6.0
joris@dipshit:/usr/lib$ sudo ln -s libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 libwebkit-1.0.so.2
joris@dipshit:/usr/lib$ ls -lhatr |grep libwebkit
-rw-r--r--   1 root root       19M 2011-04-20 14:52 libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0.6.0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root        25 2011-08-12 19:14 libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0 -> libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0.6.0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root        21 2011-09-06 23:04 libwebkit-1.0.so.2 -> libwebkitgtk-1.0.so.0
joris@dipshit:/usr/lib$

Remark; This’ll create the symbolic link based on the link which Ubuntu already placed. If we would place it on 0.6.0, there might be a problem when we upgrade libwebkitgtk.
Happy designing!

SWTError with Oracle BPM Studio 10gR3 on Ubuntu

I’ve been busy trying to get my development environment running on Ubuntu 11.04.
The following error pops up while trying to create a presentation for a bpm variable:

XPCOM error -2147467259
org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error -2147467259
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.error(Mozilla.java:1296)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.create(Mozilla.java:266)
at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser.<init>(Browser.java:109)
at fuego.ui.peer.swt.SwtBrowser.createBrowser(SwtBrowser.java:137)
at fuego.ui.peer.swt.SwtBrowser.<init>(SwtBrowser.java:43)
at fuego.ui.peer.swt.SwtFactory.createBrowser(SwtFactory.java:149)
[…]

It seems that studio can’t find xulrunner, (a runtime environment developed by the Mozilla Foundation to provide a common back-end for XUL user interface language applications)
The most common solution I could find through Google, is to install xulrunner through the ubuntu repos. Unfortunatly xulrunner 1.8 isn’t in the Natty repos so I had to download it myself.
You can find the latest 1.8 xulrunner here: Mozilla.org xulrunner-1.8.1.3.en-US.linux-i686-20080128.tar.gz

  • Unpack the contents of xulrunner-1.8.1.3.en-US.linux-i686-20080128.tar.gz
  • Rename the unpacked xulrunner directory to xulrunner-1.8
  • Move the newly created xulrunner-1.8 directory to /usr/bin
  • Fix permissions on the new directory: sudo chmod -R root:root /usr/bin/xulrunner-1.8

Final step is to add the following line to eclipse/eclipse.ini:
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.XULRunnerPath=/usr/lib/xulrunner-1.8
After this, you can start your studio and create presentations with no problems!