Cannot run/debug Java applications in Eclipse (JavaTimeZone issue)

I'm trying to get started with Eclipse/Java/Scala on a MacBook. The installed JDK was 1.5. The SDT plugin for Scala requires 1.6 which was included in an OS update, but I also manually installed a package from Apple to update 1.6. The problem is that I cannot run anything from Eclipse. I always get the following error:

An internal error occurred during: "Launching TestFooBasicTest". Could not initialize class com.ibm.icu.impl.JavaTimeZone

I also tried to use the o开发者_开发技巧ld 1.5 version, but to no avail.

What is going wrong here?

I had the same problem trying to run a scala program with Ubuntu 10.4 and stock eclipse (Galileo 3.5.2) and java (java-6-openJdk ) - and the scala pluging downloaded from scala site, of course. I fixed it by manually changing /usr/lib/eclipse/plugins/com.ibm.icu_4.0.1.v20100125.jar as suggested in this thread (btw I discovered that Emacs can change a jar file in place: nice):

http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&goto=488654

It's caused by ubuntu openjdk package with broken symbol links for TimeZone configuration. The best solution from forum thread is,

Reinstalling tzdata-java was the fix for me:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install tzdata-java

The problem is:

An internal error occurred during: "Launching TestFooBasicTest". Could not initialize class com.ibm.icu.impl.JavaTimeZone

A quick google search reveals that this class belongs to the IBM Globalization package ICU. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/index.jsp

A guess would be that this is a package used internally by Scala that you have not installed properly, causing Scala startup to fail.

Make sure that you set java 1.6 in the run configuration (Run/Run configurations).

Did you upgrade to Snow Leopard? Are you using the Eclipse SWT/Carbon or the Eclipse SWT/Cocoa? I was seeing some strangeness with Eclipse after I upgraded to SL. Switching to the Eclipse SWT/Cocoa from Eclipse SWT/Carbon helped. Also restoring my 1.5 VM, which the SL install removes in a sneaky way(by deleting and leaving the symbolic link pointing to 1.6), helped me fix several issues with Java code that had natives(i.e. usb-serial port code).

Check what are the JVMs that Eclipse is aware of and where they are located (Preferences -> Java -> Installed JRE), and also check the run/debug configuration of your programs. By default, Eclipse knows about the JRE that was used to launch itself, and other JREs that you add manually. However, if you upgrade some components and the JREs changed, Eclipse can get "confused" about them.

I had this same issue with Eclipse on Windows. I tried a number of different things including a new hello world program in a new workspace. I finally got this to work by pointing Eclipse to a different JRE to execute with. I know that Apple provides the JRE for Mac, but it does seem like this issue is related to Eclipse having trouble with the JRE used to run Eclipse itself. See here for configuring which VM Eclipse executes with.