Using Spring AOP in a maven compiled project getting "No factory method 'aspectOf()'" found exception

Question

I have inherited a webapps codebase that makes use of Spring AOP. Maven is used to compile it, run on Tomcat 6.x server. I have tried running the project via Eclipse's "Run As" & also by running mvn clean install on command line & then updating the tomcat webapps folder. Both used to give me the same exception.

SEVERE: Context initialization failed org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'com.xyz.ABCAspect#0' defined in ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/rest-servlet.xml]: No matching factory method found: factory method 'aspectOf()'. Check that a method with the specified name exists and that it is static.

I am pretty new to Spring AOP, actually AOP in general. After some research I was able to fix this issue when I ran the server through Eclipse by converting the project in to AspectJ project. After doing this I stopped getting these errors.

This seems very magical to me. And since I am facing the same issue still when doing manual compile/deploy I want to be able to zero down & fix this issue.

Here is snippet of my WEB-INF/rest-servlet.xml

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
   xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
   xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"
   xmlns:ehcache="http://ehcache-spring-annotations.googlecode.com/svn/schema/ehcache-spring"
   xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
   xsi:schemaLocation="
   http://ehcache-spring-annotations.googlecode.com/svn/schema/ehcache-spring
   http://ehcache-spring-annotations.googlecode.com/svn/schema/ehcache-spring/ehcache-spring-1.1.xsd
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-2.0.xsd
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd">

<aop:aspectj-autoproxy/>

<bean class="com.xyz.rest.aop.ABCAspect" factory-method="aspectOf">
    <property name="converter" ref="defaultConverter"/>
</bean>

Here is my ABCAspect:

@Aspect
public class ABCAspect {

    private Converter converter;

    @Around("execution(@com.xyz.converter.DTOType * *(..)) && @annotation(dtoType)")
    public Object convertType(ProceedingJoinPoint pjp, DTOType dtoType) throws Throwable {
        //...
    }
    ...
}

Here is snippet of my pom.xml:

    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>aspectj-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.4</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <goals>
              <goal>compile</goal>       <!-- use this goal to weave all your main classes -->
              <goal>test-compile</goal>  <!-- use this goal to weave all your test classes -->
            </goals>
          </execution>
        </executions>
        <configuration>
          <source>1.6</source>
          <target>1.6</target>

            <outxml>true</outxml>
            <showWeaveInfo>false</showWeaveInfo>
            <Xlint>warning</Xlint>
            <verbose>true</verbose>

        </configuration>
    </plugin>

The thing that confounds me is, what was so magical that happened after I declared my project to be AspectJ nature? that eclipse stopeed complaining.

Any pointers appreciated.

Answer 1

I found the solution. This was happening because I had wrapped the <plugins> in <pluginManagement> tag.

After I removed it, my aspectj plugin started working proeprly as in started to excecute. For detailed information on this check this stackoverflow question.