Home/ Questions/Q 793269
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-14T22:07:27+00:00

I’ve got to write some code for a legacy application that is still running

  • 0

I’ve got to write some code for a legacy application that is still running JDK 1.5. Unfortunately, it looks like OS X doesn’t actually have a 1.5 JDK installed; it just links to 1.6:

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions $ ls -l
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    5 Apr 26 11:53 1.3 -> 1.3.1
drwxr-xr-x  3 root  wheel  102 Feb 11 15:33 1.3.1
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   10 Apr 26 11:53 1.4 -> CurrentJDK
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   10 Apr 26 11:53 1.4.2 -> CurrentJDK
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   10 Apr 26 11:53 1.5 -> CurrentJDK
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel   10 Apr 26 11:53 1.5.0 -> CurrentJDK
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    5 Apr 26 11:53 1.6 -> 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x  7 root  wheel  238 Apr 26 11:53 1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x  8 root  wheel  272 Apr 26 11:53 A
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    1 Apr 26 11:53 Current -> A
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel    3 Apr 26 11:53 CurrentJDK -> 1.6

It sounds like from http://developer.apple.com/java/faq/ that Java is part of the OS update…I’m on Mac OS X v10.6.3 (Snow Leopard). Is there a way to get an actual 1.5 JDK installed on this OS version?

Or do I need to try and find an old version of OS X before I can do this work?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If you’re writing code in Eclipse or potentially some other IDE, you should be able to configure it to target 1.5 compliance.

    If you are using javac directly, you could try the -source 1.5 and/or -target 1.5 javac options, which may be sufficient for what you’re doing? The 1.6 JDK should be able to produce 1.5-compliant code.

    • 0