Scott Leberknight's Weblog

Today I was mucking around with the Spring 3.0.0.M1 source release I downloaded as a ZIP file. I wanted to simply get the sample PetClinic up and running and be able to load Spring as a project in IntelliJ. Note Spring now requires Java 6 to build, so if you're using an older 32-bit Macbook Pro you'll need to install JDK 6. I used these instructions generously provided by Landon Fuller to install Soy Latte, which is a Java 6 port for Mac OS X (Tiger and Leopard). So I went to run the "ant jar package" command (after first setting up Ivy since that is how Spring now manages dependencies) and everything went well until I got a compilation exception. There unfortunately wasn't any nice error message about why the compile failed.

So next I loaded up the Spring project in IntelliJ and tried to compile from there. Aha! It tells me that the org.springframework.aop.target package is missing as well as the org.springframework.aop.framework.autoproxy.target package, and of course all the classes in those packages were also missing. I was fairly sure I didn't accidentally delete those two packages in the source code, so I checked the spring-framework-3.0.0.M1.zip file to be sure. Sure enough those two 'target' packages are not present in the source code in the zip file. The resolution is to go grab the missing files from the Spring 3.0.0.M1 subversion repository and put them in the correct place in the source tree. The better resolution is to do an export of the 3.0.0.M1 tag from the Subversion repo directly, rather than be lazy like I was and download the zip file.

I still am wondering why the 'target' packages were missing, however. My guess is that whatever build process builds the zip file for distribution excluded directories named 'target' since 'target' is a common output directory name in build systems like Ant and Maven and usually should be excluded since it contains generated artifacts. If that assumption is correct and all directories named 'target' were excluded, then unfortunately the two aop subpackages named 'target' got mistakenly excluded which caused a bit of head-scratching as to why Spring wouldn't compile.