Question

At my work we use AspectJ in some of our Java projects. To get this to work with ant builds we have been placing aspectjtools.jar within ant/lib/.

I am now working on a particular Java project and need to use a newer version of aspectJ. I don’t want to have to get everyone who uses the project to update their local copy of aspectjtools.jar. Instead, I tried adding the newer aspectjtools.jar to the lib directory of the project and adding the following line to build.xml.

  <taskdef
     resource="org/aspectj/tools/ant/taskdefs/aspectjTaskdefs.properties"
     classpath="./lib/aspectjtools.jar" />

However, this doesn’t work as I hoped as the ANT classloader loads jars from ant/lib/ in preference to the jar I specify in the taskdef classpath.

Is there any way to force ant to pick the jar checked into my project instead?

Answer 1

The ultimate answer to my question is no. The is currently no way for ANT to use a task jar from a project in preference to a task jar in the ANT lib directory.