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.

So at this point we either need to keep banging our head against the wall on this, or consider rewriting the one place we use the meta model classes to not use them and throw that code out in order to be able to upgrade to Spring 4.1.