Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Building Tokyo Cabinet for use with Java on OS X

I've been really interested in playing with Tokyo Cabinet lately. I thought that it would be fun to take a hack at the GitHub Contest using Scala and Tokyo Cabinet. I then set out to build Tokyo Cabinet and its Java bindings (since I can call those easily from Scala). The Java bindings for Tokyo Cabinet are not pure Java, they use JNI, so you need to compile some C as well as Java. Everything looked fine and dandy until I tried to run some code. I then ran into this stack trace from Scala:



To translate, what is going on here is that by default Tokyo Cabinet will build a 32 bit binaries. Java 1.6 on OS X is 64 bit and will look for a 64 bit version of the library. Here is what I did to make things happy.

When running the configure script for Tokyo Cabinet itself, I added a flag:



I tried the same trick when configuring the Java bindings, but it didn't seem to end up in the resulting Makefile. So I edited the Makefile by hand. In the end, my CFLAGS line looks like this:



After that, I was able to get a small Scala script to create a Hash database.

As an aside, the Scala IDE for Eclipse seems really nice. I had tried it out a few months ago, and it has clearly made a lot of progress since then.