Ant can't find Objectweb asm class files when running PMD

Question

I'm trying to use Ant to run PMD, but it tells me that it can't find the Objectweb asm classes. Specifically:

build.xml:526: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/objectweb/asm/ClassVisitor

I have the objectweb-asm package installed, with the jar files in /usr/share/java/objectweb-asm . I made symbolic links to the asm jar files from ~/.ant/lib/ , but that doesn't change anything. Nor does making symbolic links to the jar file from inside /usr/share/java .

So, how do I make this work?

I'm using PMD 4.2.5, Ant 1.8.4, and objectweb-asm 3.3.1-7

The full error message from Ant:

.../build.xml:526: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/objectweb/asm/ClassVisitor
    at net.sourceforge.pmd.typeresolution.ClassTypeResolver.<init>(ClassTypeResolver.java:136)
    at net.sourceforge.pmd.typeresolution.TypeResolutionFacade.initializeWith(TypeResolutionFacade.java:15)
    at net.sourceforge.pmd.sourcetypehandlers.JavaTypeHandler$3.start(JavaTypeHandler.java:35)
    at net.sourceforge.pmd.PMD.processFile(PMD.java:118)
    at net.sourceforge.pmd.PMD.processFile(PMD.java:75)
    at net.sourceforge.pmd.PMD.processFile(PMD.java:210)
    at net.sourceforge.pmd.PMD$PmdRunnable.call(PMD.java:469)
    at net.sourceforge.pmd.PMD$PmdRunnable.call(PMD.java:427)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(FutureTask.java:262)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:1145)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:615)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:744)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.objectweb.asm.ClassVisitor
    at org.apache.tools.ant.AntClassLoader.findClassInComponents(AntClassLoader.java:1365)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.AntClassLoader.findClass(AntClassLoader.java:1315)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.AntClassLoader.loadClass(AntClassLoader.java:1068)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:358)
    ... 12 more

Answer 1

Turns out the problem is that PMD is expecting the main Objectweb asm jar file to be named asm-3.3.1.jar , when it's actually asm.jar . A simple soft link solved the problem.