Spring Starting throws an exception

So I created a maven project in Eclipse from your pom. What I've found is that you're getting the org.springframework.core.annotation.AnnotationAwareOrderComparator in two jars. The 2.5.2 spring jar and the 4.0. Get rid of the 2.5.2 jar. That's old. The new jar has the same class with the method that the new code is calling.

The issue, at the heart, is that you're double loading the core jars.