Switch CTW to LTW

Maven has lots of useful features but m2e eclipse plugin is really poor. Beacuse of weird issues with m2e plugin and aspectj-maven-plugin, I decided to switch from CTW (Compile Time Weaving) to LTW (Load Time Weaving).

First of all I removed the aspectj-maven-plugin configuration from project's pom.xml. Than I added the required spring-tomcat-weaver.jar under the Tomcat common lib directory. This library provides an instrumentable classloader for tomcat  and we need to tell to the tomcat to use the TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader with the following context.xml file.

<Context path="/webapppath" >
<Loader
loaderClass="org.springframework.instrument.classloading.tomcat.TomcatInstrumentableClassLoader"
useSystemClassLoaderAsParent="false" />
</Context> 


context.xml file should be located under META-INF directory of our web app.

In weblogic we don't need a library like this. Spring loadtime weaver does all the job for us. Of course we need to activate spring load time weaver by adding <context:load-time-weaver /> to our project's app context.

After all of these configuration process our spring project has started to weave classes on loadtime and we don't need m2e and aspectj-maven-plugin synchronization anymore.

Finally I added the following config lines to my pom.xml to execute the unit and integration tests with maven successfuly.


<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
  <argLine>
-javaagent:"${settings.localRepository}/org/springframework/spring-instrument/${spring.version}/spring-instrument-${spring.version}.jar"
  </argLine>
</configuration>
</plugin>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
  <argLine>
-javaagent:"${settings.localRepository}/org/springframework/spring-instrument/${spring.version}/spring-instrument-${spring.version}.jar"
  </argLine>
</configuration>
</plugin>