"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.