How to get JDK 1.5 on Mac OS X

Question

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 ju

Answer 1

Thanks this works great: http://wiki.oneswarm.org/index.php/OS_X_10.6_Snow_Leopard

Strangely, you must follow the renaming steps in the instructions, where you mod the symlinks for 1.5 and 1.5.0 to the actual leopard Java 1.5 - if you don't do that and just try to run the java binary, you get a bus error!

In any case, thanks to these steps I now have an actual Java 5 JDK to compile and run against in Eclipse, which saves me lots of trouble. For one thing, I can find and remove references to Java 1.6-only methods instantly. It's great. Before these would only show up in QA, or even worse, when one of the few customers still on Java 5 tried to run our program. Which was. Bad.

This is why "supporting" JDK5 while actually just pointing symlinks to Java 6 is not good enough for development.