Spring Boot with Java 9 and above

This page gathers the things that you need to know if you want to run Spring Boot apps on Java 9 and above.

Requirements

Refer to the system requirements of the reference guide to know if your target Java version is supported. Make sure you use the versioned URL that matches the Spring Boot generation you are using.

Java 17 specific

Kotlin

Kotlin 1.5.x does not support Java 17.

Gradle

You need Gradle 7.2 or later to use it with Java 17. If you can’t upgrade you can use Gradle’s toolchain support to build your project with Java 17.

Java 16 specific

Spring LDAP

Spring LDAP 2.3.3 and earlier requires --add-exports=java.naming/com.sun.jndi.ldap=ALL-UNNAMED.

Spring Boot CLI

The Spring Boot CLI does not work with Spring Boot 2.4.x as it still uses Groovy 2.5.x.

Groovy

Java 16 requires Groovy 3.x. You may need to override the version using groovy.version.

Gradle

Gradle does not yet support Java 16. Gradle projects that wish to use Java 16 should use Gradle’s toolchain support to do so.

Illegal access

Some components which Spring Boot can auto-configure, such as Hazelcast, require --illegal-access=warn.

Kotlin

Kotlin does not yet support Java 16.

Previous Java generations (Java 9 - 15)

AspectJ

With Java 9, if you need to weave classes from the JDK, you need to use AspectJ 1.9. Spring AOP should work fine in most cases with AspectJ 1.8 (the default in Spring Boot 2.0).

JAXB

When upgrading you may face the following:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/xml/bind/JAXBException

Hibernate typically requires JAXB that’s no longer provided by default. You can add the java.xml.bind module to restore this functionality with Java9 or Java10 (even if the module is deprecated).

As of Java11, the module is not available so your only option is to add the JAXB RI (you can do that as of Java9 in place of adding the java.xml.bind module:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.glassfish.jaxb</groupId>
    <artifactId>jaxb-runtime</artifactId>
</dependency>

Lombok

If you are using lombok, the managed version of Spring Boot may not work with the latest JDK. Check the Lombok web site and override its version if necessary.

Reflection APIs and WildFly

When deployed as a WAR application on WildFly, Spring Boot applications might require some advanced JDK reflection API for proxying, included in the sun.reflect package. For that, your application needs to list jdk.unsupported as a Dependency in its MANIFEST.MF file (see the WildFly wiki about this).