Maven, rmic-maven-plugin and the Ant task

This is a Java tech post, not the type I usually include here, but I spent a lot of time searching for the solution and I wanted to share my findings.

I'm migrating a project at work from Ant to Maven and needed to RMI Compile (rmic) some classes.

There appear to be a couple options: Using a Maven Plugin, rmic-maven-plugin, http://mojo.codehaus.org/rmic-maven-plugin or using the rmic Ant task. The plugin is not very well documented and is still in an Alpha-SNAPSHOT version. The Ant task works great.

I found some direction on using the task from Maven from here: http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MANTRUN-23

If you don't setup the dependencies for the maven-antrun-plugin, you'll end up with this error:
"Cannot use SUN rmic, as it is not available. A common solution is to
set the environment variable JAVA_HOME or CLASSPATH."

Below is a snippet from my pom.xml file.

<project>
.
.
.
 <build>
     <plugins>
         <plugin>
             <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
             <dependencies>
               <!-- runtime dependency for the antrun plugin.
                  It brings tools.jar into the plugins execution
                  space so the 'rmic' compiler can be called from
                  Ant's <rmic/> task.
               -->
               <dependency>
                 <groupId>sun</groupId>
                 <artifactId>tools</artifactId>
                 <version>1.0</version>
                 <scope>system</scope>
                 <systemPath>
                     ${java.home}/../lib/tools.jar
                 </systemPath>
               </dependency>
             </dependencies>
             <executions>
                 <execution>
                     <id>rmic</id>
                     <phase>compile</phase>
                     <configuration>
                         <tasks>
                             <rmic verify="true" debug="on"
                                   classpathref="maven.compile.classpath"
                                   base="${project.build.directory}/classes"
                                   includes="**/Remote*Impl.class"/>
                         </tasks>
                     </configuration>
                     <goals>
                         <goal>run</goal>
                     </goals>
                 </execution>
             </executions>
         </plugin>
     </plugins>
 </build>
</project>