How do I figure out and change which version of Java Maven is using to execute?

When running our Maven build, a member of my team gets an error when executing. However, when we run java -version from her command line, it indicates Java 1.6.0_26. The error obviously seems to be screaming that Maven is using Java 5.

How do I figure out and change what version of Java is being used by Maven?

3 potentially important notes:

1. This is executed at the command line, not using Eclipse plugin
2. JAVA_HOME is set to a Java 1.6 JDK
3. Using Maven 2.2.1

mvn -version will output which java it's using. If JAVA_HOME is set to a valid JDK directory and Maven is using something else, then most likely someone has tampered with the way that Maven starts up.

You will need to configure maven-compiler-plugin to use 1.6 source and target parameters ( by default it is 1.5 ).

This is the best done in your project's parent pom in <pluginManagment> section ( but you can always configure it per individual projects of course ).

  <build>

    <pluginManagement>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
          <version>2.3.2</version>
          <configuration>
            <source>1.6</source>
            <target>1.6</target>

          </configuration>
        </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </pluginManagement>
  </build>