[news.eclipse.tools.jdt] Re: APT and jdt.compiler.tool plugins

["Walter Harley" <wharley@xxxxxxx>]

"Eric Rizzo" <eclipse5@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
news:fcrhpf$eai$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In the course of working on an Eclipse-based tool, I've noticed that our 
> debug runtime is complaining that it can't resolve a few of the JDT 
> bundles related to APT and compiler.tool. I'm pretty sure the reason is 
> that those plugins require a J2SE-16. execution environment but our tool 
> is designed to run under 1.5.
> My question is, what, if anything, will we be missing out on by not 
> supporting those plugins? I reviewed some info on the APT home page, but I 
> would like to know if all annotation processing functionality in Eclipse 
> essentially requires 1.6 or not.

Olivier's answered the JSR-199 question; I'll address APT.

The Java 5 annotation processing functionality (processors written to the 
com.sun.mirror.apt API) only requires a 1.5 VM, and the 
org.eclipse.jdt.apt.core and ...apt.ui plug-ins.

The Java 6 annotation processing functionality (processors written to the 
javax.annotation.processing API) requires a 1.6 VM, and the 
org.eclipse.jdt.apt.pluggable.core and org.eclipse.jdt.compiler.apt plug-ins 
as well as the other org.eclipse.jdt.apt.* plug-ins.

So, if you're not using Java 6 processors, you don't need a 1.6 VM, at least 
with regard to APT.  You can ignore the "plug-in not loaded" warnings.