Provide toolchains support for Spring Boot Maven plugin

[juanpablo-santos]

As per https://maven.apache.org/guides/mini/guide-using-toolchains.html,

Maven Toolchains provide a way for plugins to discover what JDK (or other tools) are to be used during the build, without the need to configure them in each plugin nor in every pom.xml, or forcing a precise location among every machine building the project. [...] For example, you want to use a different JDK version to build your project than the version used to run Maven,

(my) concrete use case: at work, I've stumbled upon an Spring Boot 2 application, built with Maven + Java 8, which uses some javax.ws classes. When trying to run it having JDK 11 in path, the application fails with something along the lines of

[10/22 17:33:31.637][ERROR][o.springframework.boot.SpringApplication][Application run failed]
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: error Type referred to is not an annotation type: javax$jws$WebService
 [...]

which is expected, as WebService is no longer present in JDK11, I've to use a lower version. However, I was able to build the application because the compiler plugin was making use of maven toolchains, so the compiler transparently built the application using a JDK8.

I know I can switch between JDK 8 and 11 on path as needed when running the application through maven, but it would be nice if Spring Boot's maven plugin could provide toolchains support. It's a bit of an edge case, but maybe other people would find this nice to have too?

thx in advance

[snicoll]

@juanpablo-santos thanks for the suggestion. To make sure I understood, do you mean to use mvn spring-boot:run and use a different JDK for the execution of the application or something more than that?

[juanpablo-santos]

Hi @snicoll, thanks for your prompt response :-) yeah I was only referring to use mvn spring-boot:run and use a different JDK for the execution of the application.