“NoClassDefFoundError: GenericApplicationListener” when switching from Spring Boot 1.3.0M1 to 1.3.0M2

Question

In my Spring Starter created Soring Boot application I switched from Spring Boot 1.3.0M1 to 1.3.0M2. When trying to start the application (either from STS 3.7.0 or via sprin

Answer 1

Spring Boot manages a bunch of dependencies for you and allows you to add them without specifying the version. Spring Boot is obviously based on Spring Framework and uses the latest and greatest so you should avoid at all cost to fix the spring framework version to use yourself.

If you have upgraded to a newer version (to include a bug fix or something) make sure to remove the override before you upgrade Spring Boot as the new version it requires may be incompatible with your override.

If you are using other projects that also provide a dependency management on Spring Framework (such as Spring Cloud) make sure that the dependency management of Spring Boot takes precedence. With Maven, make sure to add the spring-boot-dependencies BOM as the first entry in the <dependenciesManagement> section.

Answer 2

Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/springframework/context/event/GenericApplicationListener

From the above error, application is unable to find the class defined from the jar dependencies. GenericApplicationListener is added from spring version 4.2.

Upgrade your Spring version to 4.2 and recheck.

Answer 3

I had the same problem because my POM had a properties section with a <spring.version> tag copied from another project.

Remove any <abc.version> tag in your properties section that may conflict with Spring Boot libraries.