Why doesn't AspectJ compile-time weaving of Spring's @Configurable work?

Question

Update 5: I\'ve downloaded the latest Spring ToolsSuite IDE based on the latest Eclipse. When I import my project as a Maven project, Eclipse/STS appears to

Answer 1

making a field of a @configurable class Autowired throws NullPointerException if you do not configure your spring properly for this annotation. follow these steps to make @configurable annotations work properly

This method is called AspectJ build time weaving to inject spring beans to your non-spring-made classes.

First step is to install these plugins in eclipse:

From these two update sites install whatever eclipse suggests:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/ajdt/43/update
http://dist.springsource.org/release/AJDT/configurator/ 

After installing,right-click on project and Do:

Configure > Convert to Aspectj
Maven > Update

Next, you need to add these to your pom.xml:

Under Dependencies Add:

    org.springframework
    spring-aspects
    4.0.2.RELEASE

Under Plugins Add:

        
            org.codehaus.mojo
            aspectj-maven-plugin
            1.5
            
                true
                1.7
                1.7
                ignore
                1.7
                UTF-8
                false
                
                    
                        org.springframework
                        spring-aspects
                    
                
            
            
                
                    
                        compile
                        test-compile
                    
                
            
            
                
                    org.aspectj
                    aspectjrt
                    1.7.0
                
                
                    org.aspectj
                    aspectjtools
                    1.7.0
                
            
        

Important: DO NOT use any tag under tag. your pom.xml needs to be something like this:

    ....
    
         
                    ....
        
                ....
    
    
        
            
                            ....
            
                        ....
        
    

finally add to your spring application context config file.

Now you can annotate a POJO class as @Configurable and inject spring beans in it using @Autowired annotation. this way whenever you make a new instance of that POJO it will be configured (e.g. injected with dependencies) automatically.