Nicolas Richeton

On Mac OS X, Growl has become the de facto standard for all notifications. There is an opened bug asking for Growl support in SWT/RCP : Bug 209911 – [Mac] Support for Growl notifications.

The best solution would be to have a standard API for notification with support for notification plug ins (including growl) and this is exactly what is discussed on bug 209911 and on the wiki page for Platform UI/Notifications.

But for those wanting to add Growl support to their applications as soon as possible, I’ve just attached to bug 209911 a plug-in which can successfully send Growl notifications.

Growl Action

Growl Notification from Eclipse

The Growl wrapper depends on Apple’s Java/cocoa bindings, so the trick was to add external libraries to the plugin classpath :

Bundle-ClassPath: .,
external:/System/Library/Java

It works, but you should know that :

• Apple Java/Cocoa bindings are deprecated.
• This does not work with Cocoa/x86_64, probably because of the deprecation. There you get the following error :java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /usr/lib/java/libObjCJava.A.dylib: no suitable
image found. Did find: /usr/lib/java/libObjCJava.A.dylib: no matching
architecture in universal wrapper

Hopefully, the Growl wrapper is a really small class, and it should be rather easy to rewrite it with SWT’s internal Cocoa packages for someone who knows Cocoa (I don’t). If you want to take a look at the wrapper, just download my attachment to Bug 209911 and take a look at the class : com.growl.Growl.