Could Not Initialize Class Org.apache.maven.plugin.war.util.webappstructureserializer -

During the packaging phase, the plugin needs to serialize the structure of the web application—essentially, a representation of all files that will go into the WAR, their locations, and metadata. The WebAppStructureSerializer is a utility class inside the plugin that handles this serialization, often to support features like caching or incremental builds.

Now go ahead, fix that build, and get back to delivering your web application. During the packaging phase, the plugin needs to

Then rebuild. Maven will re-download the plugin. Then rebuild

A developer using Spring Boot 2.6.x (which defaults to maven-war-plugin 3.3.2) on JDK 17 saw the error. Upgrading to Spring Boot 2.7.x (which pulls maven-war-plugin 3.3.4) solved it. Alternatively, overriding the plugin version in pom.xml to 3.4.0 worked immediately. Upgrading to Spring Boot 2

Through years of community reports and debugging sessions, the following are the most common triggers: