I needed to compile AspectJ classes (.java with annotations) with ajc and I wanted to have that integrated into the Maven build process. I tried several means, finally finding the one that worked.

Note: I had to use ajc even though I was using the pure java 5 syntax based on annotations instead of the legacy AspectJ syntax due to bug in AspectJ (fixed in v. 1.6.6).
Failed Attempts
aspectj-maven-plugin v1.2

First I tried the AspectJ Maven plugin but it didn’t work for me because I had a special need – a project containing only an aspect while the plugin requires, if I remember correctly, also the advised sources to be in the project. A fix is available and should be included in the version 1.3 but the project doesn’t seem to be very active so who knows when it will be released. See MASPECTJ-7.
maven-compiler-plugin for aspectj

Next I tried the maven-compiler-plugin, which supports various back-ends including AspectJ with the dependency on plexus-compiler-aspectj and compilerId set to aspectj. Unfortunately the plexus-compiler-aspectj is quite out of date, supporting only AspectJ 1.3 while I needed 1.6.
Finally the Success: maven-antrun-plugin

Being failed by Maven plugins, I had to resort to the standard way of running ajc via Ant. Fortunately Maven has a very good integration of Ant and its tasks.

The only problem here was that Ant requires ${java.home} to point to JDK (and not JRE) to find javac. It doesn’t help to set the envrionmental variable JAVA_HOME to point to the JDK because Maven resets it to $JAVA_HOME/jre in the case – see MANTRUN-91. The solution is to add tools.jar (which includes javac classes) to maven-antrun-plugin’s dependencies.

The corresponding piece of pom.xml:

maven-compiler-plugin



**/*.*

maven-antrun-plugin
1.3


sun.jdk
tools
1.5.0
system
${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar


org.aspectj
aspectjtools
1.6.0

compile
run



AntRun: Compiling AspectJ classes with ajc, java.home=${java.home}
resource="org/aspectj/tools/ant/taskdefs/aspectjTaskdefs.properties"
classpathref="maven.plugin.classpath" />

srcDir="src/main/java"
destDir="target/classes"
verbose="true"
showWeaveInfo="true"
source="1.5"
classpathRef="maven.compile.classpath"
Xlint="ignore" >

Note: maven-antrun-plugin v1.3 uses Ant 1.7.1 – see http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-antrun-plugin/dependencies.html
Conclusion

It’s a bit tricky but very well possible to run AspectJ compiler instead of javac during a maven build. The most flexible way is to use the AspectJ Ant task and maven-antrun-plugin though in more standard cases the aspectj-maven-plugin can serve you well too.

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