Oracle BPM Studio and Snow Leopard

Business process management (BPM) is getting more momentum. The BPMN 2.0 specification is getting final and has a few new nice features, for example a model standard so that models are interchangeable between tools. Another new feature is easier event implementation, meaning that it will be easier to run a BPMN process.

This week I started with a BPMN training from Bruce Silver. So far I like it very much. I can do it online and in my own pace. For more information see http://www.bpmessentials.com/.

Of course I want to model my BPMN process models with BPM studio. A tool that Oracle acquired from BEA and is formally known as Aqualogic BPM. The great thing about this product is that is writing in java, meaning it will run on any platform, including on my cool Macbook Air running Snow Leopard. But it didn’t start! Turns out that Snow Leopard is 64bit and BPM studio is 32bit. Read on for my solution:

Snow Leopard comes with Java 1.6, but snow leopard is a 64bit OS. It comes with Java 6 64bit and 32bit. If you switch the order of the JRE for java applications in /Applications/Utilities/Java Preferences to show 32bit on top (just drag and drop) then studio just runs fine.

There is also a more advanced solution: Open finder and go the the installation folder of BPM Suite. The default is Applications/OraBPMStudioHome. Right click on the application called “Studio”, choose “Show package content”. Open Contents/Resources and right click on “script”. Choose “open with..”, choose other and select Texteditor (or any other texteditor including xcode). Now put “-d32” without the “” on the last line just after “exec java”. It should no read something like:

exec java -d32 "${OPTIONS[@]}" -jar "$DIR/plugin /org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.0.1.R33x_v20070828.jar" $X_ECLIPSE_OPTIONS -showsplash fuego.eclipse.studio

Save and close the file. Now when you start the studio it is forced to use the 32bit JRE. Other java applications still take advantage of the 64bit JRE.