Using the FindBugs plugin for Maven with Java 5

If you use the Maven 2 FindBugs plugin with Java 5 code, you will get a lot of errors like:

    Can't use annotations when running in JDK 1.4 mode!
    Can't use JDK 1.5 for loop syntax when running in JDK 1.4 mode!
    Can't use generics unless running in JDK 1.5 mode!
    Can't use enum as a keyword in pre-JDK 1.5 target

The solution is to set the targetJdk (even though this option isn’t mentioned in the docs and even mvn help:describe can’t find it):

                <plugin>
                    <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
                    <artifactId>findbugs-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                    <version>2.3.1</version>
                    <configuration>
                        <targetJdk>1.5</targetJdk>
                    </configuration>
                </plugin>

Note that you should clean your project; otherwise the new option may not be used for some reason.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: