The problem was, my Eclipse installation was setup to use JRE 1.6 but when I checked using
mvn --version
it reported that it was using JRE 1.5.
The solution's pretty simple in fact. The versions of Java JRE that are installed on your Mac are located in
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
If you list the contents of the folder in terminal using
ls -al
then you'll see a symbolic link called "CurrentJDK" pointing to a symbolic link called "1.5" pointing to the latest version of 1.5 installed. Delete this link and recreate it pointing it to the symbolic link called "1.6" and you're done.
The following code will achieve this.
cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framwork/Versions/
sudo rm -r CurrentJDK
sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK
UPDATE Due to obvious confusion caused by my $ sign, I have reworked the code snippets to make them clearer
