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Annotations are not supported in -source 1.3 – Maven

Problem

Building a Maven project, hit following annotation error message in Maven output console.


[INFO] Compilation failure
E:\workspace\serlvetdemo\src\main\java\com\mkyong\AppServletContextListener.java:
[8,2] annotations are not supported in -source 1.3 
(use -source 5 or higher to enable annotations)
        @Override

Solution

Maven default is using JDK1.3 for the project compilation, building or packaging (mvn compile, install). Since JDK1.3 is not support annotation, if your project has annotation, you need to configure your Maven to use the latest JDK version. The solution is very simple, just include the Maven compiler plugin and specify the JDK version. For example,


<project ....>
 <build>
  <plugins>
	<plugin>
		<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
		<version>2.3.2</version>
		<configuration>
			<source>1.6</source>
			<target>1.6</target>
		</configuration>
	</plugin>
   </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

Above declaration tell Maven to use JDK 1.6.

Reference

  1. http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-compiler-plugin/

About Author

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Founder of Mkyong.com, love Java and open source stuff. Follow him on Twitter. If you like my tutorials, consider make a donation to these charities.

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Ducatista
9 years ago

How do I do this on intellij? Where can I find that xml file?

Anoosh
9 years ago

awesome

Tommy
10 years ago

Thanks man! This was a big help!

Gururaj
10 years ago

Thanks for all the suggestion, tutorials and code that you share. Really great help to whole world. Appreciate your time and efforts

Juan Pablo
10 years ago

Mkyong you are the best…

Adrian Klimczak
10 years ago

Thx man!!

news
10 years ago

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michoser
11 years ago

sometimes this site seems more powerful than googleit principle 🙂

jeremie
11 years ago

Thanks.
I struggled with that for more than a day. This really helped!

Clem
11 years ago

Thank you,
it solves the problem with my project which uses annotations and need JDK 1.5

Shirish
11 years ago

Incredibly annoying problem. Thanks! 🙂

Daniel - velaia GmbH
11 years ago

Hi, this helped with an issue I had. Locally everything worked fine, but after committing to Hudson build server the project build failed. Thanks for posting and I hope the “hudson” keyword will help people find the solution here faster.

Tommy
10 years ago

Thanks man! This post was a great time saver for me.