ANTLR dependency conflict geotools-raster and hibernate in geoserver

Niels · July 20, 2026, 11:30am

When using an extension or community module that uses hibernate, there seems to be a strict backward-incompatibility in the ANTLR 4 library.

Hibernate 7 Upgrade: GeoServer recently upgraded to hibernate-core:7.4.5.Final. This version of Hibernate depends on antlr4-runtime:4.13.2. ANTLR 4.13.x serializes its internal Abstract Syntax Trees (ATN) using version 4 of its format.
Jiffle Dependency: GeoTools and GeoServer (specifically the raster processing modules) heavily rely on org.eclipse.imagen:jiffle-language:0.9.2 (the OSGeo Jiffle library). This library was compiled against antlr4-runtime:4.7.1, which uses version 3 of the ATN format.
The Conflict: ANTLR 4 strictly refuses to parse older or newer ATN data.
- When Tomcat loads the webapp, the classloader picked up the older antlr4-runtime-4.7.1.jar.
- When Hibernate starts and tries to initialize its parsing lexer, it passes its version 4 ATN data to the version 3 ATNDeserializer from the 4.7.1 jar.
- The deserializer complains: Could not deserialize ATN with version 4 (expected 3) and crashes the application context.

I can resolve the issue locally by upgrading JIFFLE in geotools. I can make a ticket and PR for this, unless there is a reason not to do this?

aaime-geosolutions · July 20, 2026, 1:10pm

Hum… the antlr dependency is actually in ImageN, here:

github.com/eclipse-imagen/imagen

pom.xml

main


      
            <pom.fmt.action>sort</pom.fmt.action>
            <pom.fmt.skip>${spotless.apply.skip}</pom.fmt.skip>
            <hamcrest.version>3.0</hamcrest.version>
          </properties>
          
          <dependencyManagement>
            <dependencies>
              <dependency>
                <groupId>org.antlr</groupId>
                <artifactId>antlr4-runtime</artifactId>
                <version>4.7.1</version>
              </dependency>
              <dependency>
                <groupId>org.codehaus.janino</groupId>
                <artifactId>janino</artifactId>
                <version>3.1.12</version>
              </dependency>
              <dependency>
                <groupId>org.locationtech.jts</groupId>
                <artifactId>jts-core</artifactId>
                <version>${jts.version}</version>

No objection to an upgrade, just make sure it does not come with visible regressions (behavior, memory usage, performance)

Cheers
Andrea

jive · July 31, 2026, 6:08pm

Hi @Niels, reporting the issue here ANTLR dependency conflict org.eclipse.imagen:jiffle-language: and hibernate-core:7.4.5.Final · Issue #157 · eclipse-imagen/imagen · GitHub if you have an opportunity to work on it.