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

Although the -source and -target flags can be used, they don't always produce code which works on all older JREs. I've definitely had occasions where trying to back-compile to an older spec produced code which worked fine for some users, but wouldn't run on others. To be really sure that everyone using a 1.5 or 1.4 JRE can run your code, you should probably do your production builds with a 1.5 or 1.4 JDK.

I found these instructions very helpful on getting a "real" 1.5 and 1.4 JDK installed under snow leopard: http://codethought.com/blog/?p=233