update to 1.18
Purpose
Update to 1.18 due to issues with compatibility.
Approach
Updated the poms, fixed deprecation issues
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Thanks for your contribution, sorry we have been very inactive for a long time but we have now updated to 1.19 (thanks to @joshi1999 and #363). We'll close this out now since obviously it's no longer needed, but feel free to re-open any additional PRs for any improvements/bugs that this PR also fixed.