I installed IBM Worklight 6.0 following the instructions on the IBM Worklight installation page

Generally my focus is on web-development and on delivering a ‘one web‘ experience using responsive design to allow a website to adapt to whatever device is accessing it (N.B. the one web article is great, make sure to read it at least once!). I do recognise that there are cases where ‘mobile apps’ are preferred either for access to device features, offline behaviour or just because that is what the customer wants.

In these cases I’d rather create a hybrid app that is basically using my familiar web-technology such as HTML, CSS and Javascript, but running in a container, rather than create a native application. This allows the app to be much more portable to other platforms and also saves me from having to learn several more languages and technology stacks. IBM Worklight is a product for creating these kind of hybrid applications, building upon the Apache Cordova / Phonegap technology, so this seems like a good choice of platform to experiment with hybrid apps. Disclaimer – I work for IBM.

The instructions were mostly simple and straightforward, but I hit a couple of unexpected errors, so I thought it was worth noting them in this post.

First of all you need to download the correct version of Eclipse. It needs to be Juno 4.2.2, and it needs to be SR2. The eclipse download page when you click on Juno first of all shows only SR1 downloads which is really confusing. This led to errors later on when trying to install Worklight. This is the link you need: Download Eclipse Juno SR2 and then you want ‘Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers’.

Eclipse then doesn’t need installing, once downloaded it just needs to be unzipped to a directory and you run the .exe to launch it. You do need to have a Java runtime or SDK installed in order to run Eclipse. One of my PCs I didn’t have to do anything here, for the other I installed the Java 7 SDK from the Oracle website

The Eclipse Marketplace allows you to install Worklight. Once Eclipse is running, go to Help -> Eclipse Marketplace, Search for Worklight and click install.

At first I got the error below about dependencies. This is the same error I got when using Eclipse SR1. This time it seemed to be caused because I had put Eclipse in a directory that needed admin access (C:\Program Files\). Once I moved it to a different directory in a less protected location the installation then went fine. I was then able to move onto the tutorials on the IBM site to get the traditional HelloWorld application running.

This is the error I got both when using Eclipse SR1 and when I had Eclipse in a directory that needed admin rights:

Cannot complete the install because of a conflicting dependency.
  Software being installed: IBM jQuery Mobile Tools 6.0.0.201309262019 (com.ibm.webtools.jquery.tools.feature.feature.group 6.0.0.201309262019)
  Software currently installed: Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers 1.5.1.20120917-1257 (epp.package.jee 1.5.1.20120917-1257)
  Only one of the following can be installed at once: 
    Eclipse UI 3.103.0.v20120521-2329 (org.eclipse.ui 3.103.0.v20120521-2329)
    Eclipse UI 3.103.0.v20120705-114351 (org.eclipse.ui 3.103.0.v20120705-114351)
    Eclipse UI 3.104.0.v20121024-145224 (org.eclipse.ui 3.104.0.v20121024-145224)
  Cannot satisfy dependency:
    From: Rich Page Editor - jQuery extensions 2.0.0.v20130523_1421 (com.ibm.etools.rpe.jquery 2.0.0.v20130523_1421)
    To: bundle com.ibm.etools.rpe.mobile.patterns [1.0.0,2.0.0)
  Cannot satisfy dependency:
    From: Mobile Patterns 1.0.0.v20130508_1207 (com.ibm.etools.rpe.mobile.patterns 1.0.0.v20130508_1207)
    To: bundle org.eclipse.ui [3.104.0,4.0.0)
  Cannot satisfy dependency:
    From: jQuery Web Tools 1.0.100.v20130523_1421 (com.ibm.webtools.jquery.feature.feature.group 1.0.100.v20130523_1421)