Possible Duplicate:
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
I'm trying to learn basics of writing a simple jsp/servlet web application with no IDE/build tool etc. Just a text editor and a command line. I have some .jsps that are using a couple Java classes that I wrote. Here is a snippet from the jsp called display_email_entry.jsp
        <%
        //get parameters from the request
        String firstName = request.getParameter("firstName");
        String lastName = request.getParameter("lastName");
        String emailAddress = request.getParameter("emailAddress");
        //get the real path for the EmailList.txt file
        ServletContext sc = request.getServletContext();
        String path = sc.getRealPath("/WEB-INF/EmailList.txt");
        //use regular java objects
        User user = new User(firstName, lastName, emailAddress);
        UserIO.add(user, path);
    %>
So I am doing all of this bare bones, just using a text editor and trying to understand how to compile this from the command line and then deploy it to tomcat manually. But I don't know what to do to generate the .class files from the .java files and get them into WEB-INF/classes and have this little practice application run.
My current file structure looks like this:
User ->
  index.html
  display_email_entry.jsp
  business ->
    User.java
  data ->
    UserIO.java
  WEB-INF ->
    web.xml
  classes (currently empty)
I've tried to go do this:
javac -d WEB-INF/classes data/UserIO.java
Which generates class files for me, but when I try to run it on the web server I am getting the following error.
HTTP Status 500 - javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: business/User : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0 (unable to load class business.User)
So I'm kinda stuck. I'm hoping someone can point out what I'm doing wrong here. Thanks in advance.
 
    