Building JDK 5 projects with Maven 2

I had a difficult time working out from the Apache Maven 2 site documentation how to build my JDK 5 projects with m2. I found the spot in the documentation for configuring plugins and reasoned that the Java compilation goal must be connected to a plugin, but did not see exactly how to tie it all together.

After several futile Google attempts, I finally hit upon trying pom.xml source target 1.5 and found this JIRA issue covering an example and including an attached pom.xml. Using the example, a basic POM (what was previously project.xml with Maven 1) is:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.mycompany.app</groupId>
  <artifactId>my-app</artifactId>
  <packaging>jar</packaging>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>Maven Quick Start Archetype</name>
  <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>junit</groupId>
      <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
      <version>3.8.1</version>
      <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <source>1.5</source>
          <target>1.5</target>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

I got this by running the suggested new project generator:

m2 archetype:create -DgroupId=com.mycompany.app -DartifactId=my-app

And adding the needed <build/> section.