First of all, according to the documentation, the JAX-WS reference implementation should work with Java 5.
The binary package with the latest version (2.2.7), however, was compiled using Java 6 (class version 50.0), so using it with Java 5 will throw an UnsupportedClassVersionError. I downloaded Java sources and tried to compile them using Java 5, but since the dependent libraries were compiled for Java 6, this also does not work. I tried to compile the new version with Java 6 using "-target 1.5" to at least get the correct version of the class in the compiled files, but I'm not sure if I encountered other problems if the implementation at some point actually expects Java 6 or newer.
Does anyone know the latest version of JAX-WS RI, which is known to work with Java 5 without such workarounds?
Edit:
To answer at least one part of my question, the JAX-WS RI implementation uses the new functionality in the Java 6 SE API and will not work on Java 5, even if the classes are compiled for the target version 1.5. At least the org.jvnet.ws.message.BasePropertySet class uses the java.util.AbstractMap $ SimpleImmutableEntry class, available only since Java 1.6.
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