Ant is using wrong java version

According to the ant manual, setting JAVA_HOME should work - are you sure the changed setting is visible to ant?

Alternatively, you could use the JAVACMD variable.

Run ant in verbose mode : ant -v and looks for clues.

You can use the target and source properties on the javac tag to set a target runtime. The example below will compile any source code to target version 1.4 on any compiler that supports version 1.4 or later.

<javac compiler="classic" taskname="javac" includeAntRuntime="no" fork=" deprecation="true" target="1.4" source="1.4" srcdir="${src}" destdir="${classes}">

Note: The 'srcdir' and 'destdir' are property values set else where in the build script, e.g. <property name="classes" value="c:/classes" />

You can also specify in a javac task what level of compatibility ( 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 ) you want to use, you can set the "source" and "target" level values, check the docs here : Javac task documentation

JAVACMD is an Ant specific environment variable. Ant doc says:

JAVACMD—full path of the Java executable. Use this to invoke a different JVM than JAVA_HOME/bin/java(.exe).

So, if your java.exe full path is: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_211\bin\java.exe, create a new environment variable called JAVACMD and set its value to the mentioned path (including \java.exe). Note that you need to close and reopen your terminal (cmd, Powershell, etc) so the new environment variable takes effect.

Set your JAVA_HOME environment variable with the required java version (in your case java 1.5), then in build.xml use executable="${JAVA_HOME}/bin/javac" inside <javac></javac> tag .

example:

<target name="java compiler" description="Compiles the java code">
    <javac executable="${JAVA_HOME}/bin/javac" srcdir="./src" 
        destdir="${build.dir}/classes"> 
    </javac> 
</target>

If your build file does not already have it (some do, e.g. Apache Tomcat), you can add an echoproperties target to build.xml, e.g.

<target name="echoproperties">
    <echoproperties/>
</target>

Then you can run the ant task echoproperties and look for "java.version" or ant -v and look for "Java version", e.g. on my machine

ant echoproperties | grep java.version

shows

[echoproperties] java.version=11.0.9.1

and

ant -v | grep -i "java version"

shows

Detected Java version: 11 in: /opt/java/zulu11.43.55-ca-jdk11.0.9.1-linux_x64