Does anyone control which compiler version is used?

Question

hi,
does anyone control which version of javac/jikes et al is being used for large projects?
as I understand it its very unlikely to make a difference modulo the recent bugs in the 1.5 compiler?
ie if you don't specify the source or target flags then not a lot can go wrong?
in summary, is the assertion that controlling the compiler version used in the way that you might for native C/C++ projects in a java project is much less likely to have any impact?
thanks,
asjf

Answer 1

Everyone on a project should be working to the same version.A third party product we needed, "Active Merchant" works only with java version 1.3.
(I tried it and it really does not work with either 1.2 or 1.4) . This product consists of a client library (an API) which you can use in your application, and which communicates with the other part, the server .
Now we did not want to use 1.3 in the application server because of this circumstance, so we were forced to write an own auxiliary application in 1.3, which can be reached through the network and which talks to the given API, that in turn talks to the server.
So one guy working on that little own auxiliary application was working with 1.3, whereas the others were working with 1.2 (the old version f our application) and 1.4 (the new version of our application).
Moreover all those guys were one person (your humble narrator) in different "roles", that is, working on different parts of the project.