How can I download Maven artifacts within a plugin?

Your plugin needs to create an Artifact using the ArtifactFactory and the groupId, artifactId and version of the artifact to be bootstrapped, then pass that artifact to an ArtifactResolver to handle the discovery/download.

The resolver needs access to the local repository and remote repositories. The good news is that all those are plexus components that you can declare as dependencies in your Mojo and have Plexus wire them in for you.

In another answer I showed how to do this. In your case you need a cut-down version with slightly different parameters to read the groupId, artifactId and version. In the plugin below, the various components are declared as plexus components, and the properties to declare the groupId, artifactId, version, and packaging type.

package name.seller.rich.maven.plugins.bootstrap;

import java.util.List;

import org.apache.maven.artifact.Artifact;
import org.apache.maven.artifact.factory.ArtifactFactory;
import org.apache.maven.artifact.repository.ArtifactRepository;
import org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.ArtifactNotFoundException;
import org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.ArtifactResolutionException;
import org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.ArtifactResolver;
import org.apache.maven.plugin.AbstractMojo;
import org.apache.maven.plugin.MojoExecutionException;
import org.apache.maven.plugin.MojoFailureException;

/**
 * Obtain the artifact defined by the groupId, artifactId, and version
 * from the remote repository.
 * 
 * @goal bootstrap
 */
public class BootstrapAppMojo extends AbstractMojo {

    /**
     * Used to look up Artifacts in the remote repository.
     * 
     * @parameter expression=
     *  "${component.org.apache.maven.artifact.factory.ArtifactFactory}"
     * @required
     * @readonly
     */
    protected ArtifactFactory factory;

    /**
     * Used to look up Artifacts in the remote repository.
     * 
     * @parameter expression=
     *  "${component.org.apache.maven.artifact.resolver.ArtifactResolver}"
     * @required
     * @readonly
     */
    protected ArtifactResolver artifactResolver;

    /**
     * List of Remote Repositories used by the resolver
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${project.remoteArtifactRepositories}"
     * @readonly
     * @required
     */
    protected List remoteRepositories;

    /**
     * Location of the local repository.
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${localRepository}"
     * @readonly
     * @required
     */
    protected ArtifactRepository localRepository;

    /**
     * The target pom's artifactId
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${bootstrapArtifactId}"
     * @required
     */
    private String bootstrapArtifactId;

    /**
     * The target pom's groupId
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${bootstrapGroupId}"
     * @required
     */
    private String bootstrapGroupId;

    /**
     * The target pom's type
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${bootstrapType}"
     * @required
     */
    private String bootstrapType;

    /**
     * The target pom's version
     * 
     * @parameter expression="${bootstrapVersion}"
     * @required
     */
    private String bootstrapVersion;

    public void execute() throws MojoExecutionException, MojoFailureException {
        try {
            Artifact pomArtifact = this.factory.createArtifact(
                bootstrapGroupId, bootstrapArtifactId, bootstrapVersion,
                "", bootstrapType);

            artifactResolver.resolve(pomArtifact, this.remoteRepositories,
                this.localRepository);
        } catch (ArtifactResolutionException e) {
            getLog().error("can't resolve parent pom", e);
        } catch (ArtifactNotFoundException e) {
            getLog().error("can't resolve parent pom", e);
        }
    }
}

This is an example of a pom configured to use the plugin (and download the aspectjrt 1.6.4 pom):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project>
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>name.seller.rich</groupId>
  <artifactId>bootstrap-test</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
    <build>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
          <groupId>name.seller.rich</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-bootstrap-plugin</artifactId>
          <executions>
            <execution>
              <phase>package</phase>
              <goals>
                <goal>bootstrap</goal>
              </goals>
              <configuration>
                <bootstrapGroupId>org.aspectj</bootstrapGroupId>
                <bootstrapArtifactId>aspectjrt</bootstrapArtifactId>
                <bootstrapVersion>1.6.4</bootstrapVersion>
                <bootstrapType>pom</bootstrapType>
              </configuration>
            </execution>
          </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>