Booting up Eclipse to work on a new release of some app I noticed something quite weird, all the android related buttons/menus weren’t there, even though they were present the last time I had used eclipse 2 days ago. I checked the installed plugins list and the android plugin was listed there, SDK/AVD Manager were both installed, yet weren’t working as expected. The SDK manager only listed 2.3 SDK even though I had downloaded my way up to 4.
I checked eclipse startup log, I noticed many noclassfound exceptions listed during startup, especially as it invoked android related libraries. My intuition told me it had something to do with the installed JREs, even though i had the most recent JRE installed, Eclipse was using JRE 1.5. Which was quite weird given that I’ve not done any recent changes to my system that impacted the JRE run level.
I re-added the new JRE’s to eclipse and still the same error was there. I guessed it must be a system wide issue, so I ran java -version and indeed the java my windows was looking up was 1.5. Fixed the environment settings by correcting the path, and android plugins reappeared.
Turns out that while installing Portal BRM tools it replaces the current JRE without indicating that it did.
Issue:
Android plug in dissapearing from Eclipse.
Cause:
JRE being replaced, Android ADT plugin requires at JRE1.6+ to appear in eclipse.
Solution:
Checking the installed JRE’s on the system.
Checking the default java by running java -version
Checking the default JRE in eclipse.
make them all point to a 1.6+ version and restarting eclipse.
