The Site With the Lamp

March 27, 2007

The CDAX software which provides direct access to the Colombo Joke Exchange, picked itself off the ground towards late aftenoo yesterday. I suspect the blank screens were due largely to bugs at the server rather than in the client sofware. Yesterday was significant day for the market. Not just because of the airport attack but also because of the emerging patterns on the chart (which doesn't always amount to anything).

Whiles biting my nails trying to figure out how much of my savings have been wiped off, I tried to install CDAX on my macbook. The installation itself went smoothly but the application would refuse to start up.

[JavaAppLauncher Error] CallStaticVoidMethod() threw an exception
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version number in .class file
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:620)
	at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:124)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:260)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:56)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:195)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
	at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:268)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:251)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:319)
	at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
	at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:242)
	at apple.launcher.LaunchRunner.loadMainMethod(LaunchRunner.java:55)
	at apple.launcher.LaunchRunner.run(LaunchRunner.java:84)
	at apple.launcher.LaunchRunner.callMain(LaunchRunner.java:50)
	at apple.launcher.JavaApplicationLauncher.launch(JavaApplication

They have compiled CDAX using a java 6 compiler. I know this is so because the version on linux refused to run with my java 5 run time. The lame installer on linux has the JVM included in it (which I didn't need anyway cause I had a java 6 but it wasn't my default). When it comes to the Mac OS X version they cannot bundle java 6 with the installer. Why not? because it's not yet available. The rumour is that it will not be available till leopard is released.

So how do you run CDAX on OS X? well you can't at the moment, I wouldn't be suprised if no one in the dev team even bothered to test it. It's more than likely that they just made use of the feature in jinstall to create bundles for each OS but didn't bother to test!

What is the purpose of using java 6 anyway? I cannot think of even one single feature of java 6 that they cannot do without. Heck they don't even need java 5 (which is the minimum requirement for the previous version of CDAX)