Use Maven and use the maven-compiler-plugin to explicitly call the actual correct version JDK javac.exe command, because Maven could be running any version; this also catches the really stupid long standing bug in javac that does not spot runtime breaking class version jars and missing classes/methods/properties when compiling for earlier java versions! This later part could have easily been fixed in Java 1.5+ by adding versioning attributes to new classes, methods, and properties, or separate compiler versioning data, so is a quite stupid oversight by Sun and Oracle.