Last Monday I got into the office and I decided that is it, I am going to get our app upgraded to Spring 4.1. I had been working on this off and on for like 9 months, updating dependencies in the pom, doing some testing, wash, rinse, repeat…

As I had mentioned in a previous posts one of the first issues I had was the new aspect j running the hibernate metamodel generator and dumping a bunch of generated class in the root level directory of wherever maven was running. I had opened a Jira against the aspectj-maven-plugin. There was even a user who contributed a patch for the issue, and the developer promised to look at it in January but months went by with no effort to resolve the issue. Now CodeHaus is shutdown and the active projects have moved to MojoHaus. As of yet the aspectj-maven-plugin hasn’t been moved so more and more it looks like my decision to download the code from their SVN repository and fork it on github was correct.

I have been using open source software now for about 20 years. One of the things that I always saw discussed back in the day was if you don’t like the way a project is being run you can always fork it and do things differently. In all my years I have never actually felt the need to do such a thing because lets be honest running an open source project is a ton of work. As readers of my blog know I have been wanting to update to Spring 4.1. What has been holding us back was a change in aspectj 1.8.2 where it would automatically process annotations found in the code. This ends up generating the hibernate meta-model and dumping the files wherever maven was invoked. So trying to work within the project I opened up a jira for an enhancement which would allow me to pass a flag to the compiler to not process the annotations. There was a quick response at the beginning of January and I was left with the impression that this would be handled in a couple of weeks. Finally in the middle of February with the work still not done Ralph Engelmann submitted a patch which would actually implement the feature.

For a while now I have been avoiding upgrading the maven java compiler plugin. We are running 2.5.1 at work. The problem is, in the 3.x version, they seemed to have rewritten it, and it doesn’t want to play nice with the maven-processor-plugin that we used to run the hibernate meta model generator. So far it was like cool, I just won’t upgrade to the new version.

Then AspectJ came out with 1.8.2 and the new AspectJ compiler plugin which also seems to be built like the new compiler plugin. At this point I was like well then I might as well update both since Spring 4.1 wants at least AspectJ 1.8.2. But I still have the whole thing fall apart at that meta model step. I found a flag for the maven compiler about forceJavacCompilerUse but even that didn’t solve the problem for me. A coworker said basically AspectJ seems to be doing what we were using the maven-processor-plugin for and generating the meta models for the entities, so he disabled that plugin. However for some reason instead of dumping the generated files in the target directory it is putting them in whatever directory you are in for the build and we can’t seem to find a way to get it to drop them in the target folder.