I have a grails application which is running properly with jdk1.7.0_72 and tomcat-7.0.47
Can I use jdk1.8.0_77 insted of jdk1.7.0_72?
Groovy 2.3 was the first official version to support Java 8.
Your Grails lib folder has the Groovy version it depends on. From installs on my machine:
grails-2.3.7/lib/org.codehaus.groovy/groovy-all/jars/groovy-all-2.1.9.jar
grails-2.4.0/lib/org.codehaus.groovy/groovy-all/jars/groovy-all-2.3.1.jar
grails-2.4.3/lib/org.codehaus.groovy/groovy-all/jars/groovy-all-2.3.6.jar
grails-2.4.4/lib/org.codehaus.groovy/groovy-all/jars/groovy-all-2.3.7.jar
grails-3.0.8/lib/org.codehaus.groovy/groovy/groovy-2.4.4.pom
grails-3.1.3/lib/org.codehaus.groovy/groovy/groovy-2.4.6.pom
So, you need to go to at least Grails 2.4.x