Spring 3 ASM - Spring asm Dependency

In earlier version of Spring (Spring version 2.5) the asm library was included. But the current version of Spring 3 does not contains the asm library. So, you have to download and add the asm library to your project.

In this section you will find the instruction to download and add the asm library into your project.

What is ASM?

The ASM is very small framework that is used to analyze and manipulate Java byte codes. It is used in Spring 3 framework to dynamically modify the Java bytecode and generate the new bye code in runtime. The ASM framework is easy to use and fast. Its performance is good. You can read more about the asm framework at http://asm.ow2.org/. The latest version of asm library can be downloaded from http://asm.ow2.org/download/index.html. If you getting any error in your Spring framework then you can get the latest version of asm library from the asm official website.

If you don't include the asm dependency in your Spring 3 project you might get the following error:

Jan 2, 2010 2:49:26 PM org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext prepareRefresh

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot load configuration class: net.roseindia.Spring3HelloWorldConfig

at org.springframework.context.annotation.ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.enhanceConfiguration
Classes(ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.java:274)

at org.springframework.context.annotation.ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.postProcessBean
Factory(ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.java:147)

at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.invokeBeanFactoryPost
Processors(AbstractApplicationContext.java:624)

at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.invokeBeanFactory
PostProcessors(AbstractApplicationContext.java:614)

at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplication
Context.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:398)

at org.springframework.context.annotation.Annotation
ConfigApplicationContext.<init>(AnnotationConfigApplicationContext.java:65)

at net.roseindia.Spring3HelloWorldConfigTest.main(Spring3HelloWorldConfigTest.java:9)

at net.sf.cglib.core.TypeUtils.parseType(TypeUtils.java:180)

at net.sf.cglib.core.KeyFactory.<clinit>(KeyFactory.java:66)

at net.sf.cglib.proxy.Enhancer.<clinit>(Enhancer.java:69)

at org.springframework.context.annotation.ConfigurationClass
Enhancer.newEnhancer(ConfigurationClassEnhancer.java:101)

at org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration
ClassEnhancer.enhance(ConfigurationClassEnhancer.java:89)

at org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration
ClassPostProcessor.enhanceConfigurationClasses(ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.java:266)

Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.objectweb.asm.Type

at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)

at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)

... 12 more 1

If you are using the maven to for development of your project then following entry can be added to pom.xml

<dependency>
  <groupId>asm</groupId>
  <artifactId>asm-commons</artifactId>
  <version>2.2.3</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
   <groupId>asm</groupId>
   <artifactId>asm</artifactId>
   <version>2.2.3</version>
</dependency>

The above dependency entry will add include asm library into your project. 2