WO deployment refuses to launch

hello,

i have a WO project that runs perfectly fine on my dev machine but
fails to launch on my deployment machine. i get the following error
when i attempt to start it from the command line...

  /usr/local/apple/Local/Library/WebObjects/Extensions/mysql-connector-java-3.1.6-bin.jar
  /usr/local/apple/Local/Library/WebObjects/Extensions/
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Application (Unsupported
major.minor version 49.0)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass0(Native Method)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:539)
        at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:123)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:251)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:55)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:194)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:187)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:289)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:235)
        at com.webobjects._bootstrap.WOBootstrap.main(WOBootstrap.java:68)

My development machine has 5.3 (latest revision) and the deployment
machine has 5.2. This setup was working perfectly fine but now i fear
that its causing trouble. Or is it something else?

Any ideas would begreatly appreciated.

thanks,
matt