DealingWithJava5CompilerIssues

Because apple has not yet moved to Java 6, the Protege team has remained with the Java 5 development platform. Since this is an old platform that is coming close to its end of life there are bugs that have been fixed in Java 6 but not in Java 5. When I was working on solving this problem, I had no idea how to isolate the problem. In the end I got lucky and found an approach that worked so I thought that I would report it here.

To see the problem, checkout [1] at revision 14332 and run

    ant clean equinox

If you do this with apple's Java 5 compiler you will see the error

    [javac] An exception has occurred in the compiler (1.5.0_16). Please file a bug at the Java Developer Connection (http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport)  after checking the Bug Parade for duplicates. Include your program and the following diagnostic in your report.  Thank you.
    [javac] java.lang.NullPointerException
    [javac] 	at com.sun.tools.javac.tree.TreeMaker.Ident(TreeMaker.java:413)
    [javac] 	at com.sun.tools.javac.comp.Lower.access(Lower.java:956)
    [javac] 	at com.sun.tools.javac.comp.Lower.access(Lower.java:1048)

If you do this on one of the Java 5 sun compiler's you will see an AssertionError with a similar stack.