NetBeans 7.1.2 does not work with JDK 8

I've recently installed the JDK 8 on my rMBP and all of a sudden NetBeans stopped working for me. I've dug into this a little further and tried several things, none of which worked, in the end I ended up forcing NetBeans to use JDK 7 and everything was working again.

First NetBeans stopped launching from my Dock, so I opened up Terminal and tried to launch it manually, this presented me with the following error:

> open /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 7.1.2.app

LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 7.1.2.app.

Not much information here, so I tried to launch the NetBeans binary instead:

> /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 7.1.2.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/bin/netbeans

Unrecognized VM option 'MaxPermSize=384m'

Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.

Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.

Now I was getting somewhere.

The /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 7.1.2.app/Contents/MacOS/netbeans script has the following setting:

netbeans_default_options="-J-XX:MaxPermSize=384m ${netbeans_default_options}"

I tried removing the MaxPermSize setting, but it still failed with:

Unrecognized VM option 'PermSize=32m'

I dug in deeper and removed the PermSize setting from /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 7.1.2.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.conf.

Now the slash screen was showing up, yet NetBeans would still crash. The ~/.netbeans/7.1.2/var/log/messages.log file had the following exception:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: java.lang.IllegalAccessException: Class org.openide.util.WeakListenerImpl$ProxyListener can not access a member of class org.openide.filesystems.$Proxy0 with modifiers "public"

at org.openide.util.WeakListenerImpl$ProxyListener.<init>(WeakListenerImpl.java:423)

at org.openide.util.WeakListenerImpl.create(WeakListenerImpl.java:164)

at org.openide.util.WeakListeners.create(WeakListeners.java:271)

at org.openide.filesystems.MultiFileObject.<init>(MultiFileObject.java:125)

at org.openide.filesystems.MultiFileObject.<init>(MultiFileObject.java:142)

at org.openide.filesystems.MultiFileSystem.getMultiRoot(MultiFileSystem.java:267)

at org.openide.filesystems.MultiFileSystem.findResource(MultiFileSystem.java:355)

at org.openide.filesystems.FileUtil.getConfigFile(FileUtil.java:2227)

at org.openide.filesystems.FileUtil.getConfigRoot(FileUtil.java:2257)

at org.netbeans.core.startup.Main.getModuleSystem(Main.java:162)

at org.netbeans.core.startup.Main.start(Main.java:308)

at org.netbeans.core.startup.TopThreadGroup.run(TopThreadGroup.java:123)

at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

This is do to with the Java security manager, everything I tried to disable it made NetBeans not start at all, the only workaround was to force JDK 7 to be used instead. I updated the /Applications/NetBeans/NetBeans 7.1.2.app/Contents/Resources/NetBeans/etc/netbeans.conf file to have the following entry in my case:

netbeans_jdkhome="/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home"

Now NetBeans starts as expected.

-i