Josh,
It should be possible given that the Cloverleaf client is a Java application. I’m running a 5.6 Cloverleaf client on OS X 10.6.6. It works pretty well aside from some occasional quirky window resizing issues.
The big problem is that Cloverleaf 5.6 needs Java 1.5.0 (or earlier) for the NetConfig to work properly. The reason for this is that the Cloverleaf developers decided to use the deprecated SwingUtilities2 java class and after version 1.5.0, that class is no longer available in Java. Trying to run Cloverleaf with version 1.6 will result in a NoClassDefFoundException when you try to right click on a thread in the NetConfig and click Thread Properties.
Anyway the big problem with all of this is that current version of OS X only come with JRE 1.6, so you will have to obtain a copy of JRE 1.5 from an earlier version of OS X and copy it to /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.Framework/Versions. You’ll see in that folder that there is a symlink for version 1.5.0 but it really just points to the folder that contains 1.6.0. You have to delete the symlink and copy in the JRE 1.5.0 from an earlier OS Release.
Anyway, if you are lucky, Cloverleaf 5.7/5.8 will be capable of using a newer version of the JRE. If that’s the case then you will be in much better shape.
Once you do all that you can start testing things out. Open a shell window and set the HCIROOT profile variable:
> export HCIROOT=/path/to/cloverleaf/client/directory
then you can try to run hciaccess
> cd $HCIROOT/clgui/bin
> ./hciaccess &
If you can get the GUI running this way without any issues then the next step is to install the OS X Developer Tools and use the Jar Bundler utility which allows you to build an OS X application bundle out of a Java application. For me using the Jar Bundler was a trial and error thing, but I eventually got everything working.
I completely agree it’s a lot of work, but when you get it working it is wonderful and so nice to have an icon you can launch from your dock to get the GUI up and running. I even found a nice icon of a 4 leaf clover that I use for the Cloverleaf app bundle.
Good luck. If you need additional help give me a hollar: carter_harrison@bshsi.org