struts 2 spring plugin - spring version

Question

When using the spring plugin for struts 2, is it possible to use the latest version of spring or are you stuck with the version referenced in the plugin? For example in my project I am using struts 2.3.16.3 and its spring plugin automatically uses spring 3.0.5 . So if I add spring 4.1 to my pom as a dependency then there are multiple versions of spring added to the classpath.

Answer 1

You shouldn't have more than one Spring library in your classpath - disaster will be bound to happen. I guess you can either exclude the spring dependency in that plugin or set its version to the one you want. The main problem with this approach is moving between major versions (3.x to 4.x) - if Spring is respecting Semantic Versioning incompatibilities will exist between the two versions and it is possible (or likely) that struts2-spring-plugin is using something that changed.

Edit: Comment below reports successful usage of struts2-spring-plugin and Spring4.