You can use the Maven Help Plugin's describe goal. Note that you must give the plugin prefix as the argument to plugin, not it's artifact ID. For example, to find out the version of the install plugin.
You must configure the source and target parameters in your pom, by default this is version 1.3. For example, to set the source and target JVM to 1.5, you should have in your pom.
The following code includes tools.jar on Sun JDKs (it is already included in the runtime for Mac OS X and some free JDKs). It adds it via a profile so compilation is less likely to break using other JDKs.
Configure your ide to use the correct encoding. With eclipse, add -Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1 in eclipse.ini file.
To configure the file encoding used by mvn, add to MAVEN_OPTS the encoding (same as the ide). This can be made with adding MAVEN_OPTS="-Dfile.encoding=ISO-8859-1" in $HOME/.profile.
Finally, configure the output encoding in your pom: