Weblogic 12.2.1 - with Spring3.2.1

We are trying to upgrade to weblogic12.2.1 from 12.1.3 to utilize the federated caching feature.  Our application uses Spring 3.2.1 and JRE 1.7.

With weblogic 12.2.1, we need to have JDK1..8 to have the managed servers running.

When I tried to deploy our apps, I am getting the below exception with Spring,

at org.springframework.asm.ClassReader.<init>(Unknown Source)

        at org.springframework.asm.ClassReader.<init>(Unknown Source)

        at org.springframework.asm.ClassReader.<init>(Unknown Source)

        at org.springframework.core.type.classreading.SimpleMetadataReader.<init>(SimpleMetadataReader.java:52)

This exception is because of incompatibility of Spring 3.2.X with JDK 8.  So, do I need to upgrade the Spring version to 4.X ?