Generating Spring IDE Descriptor Files from Maven

Published by Christian 3 weeks, 4 days ago 1 Comment

My Google Alerts just sent me this and I though it might be worth sharing:

The Eclipse plugin will create/change the .springBeans and the .settings/org.springframework.ide.eclipse.core.prefs. Then you can refresh the Eclipse project (F5) from now the project contains a Spring-Builder which will handle the …#

The same approach should work for the .springWebflow descriptor file.

Furthermore there is IDE-603 to create a Maven plugin that can create those files.

Eclipse Community Award Finalist

Published by Christian 2 months, 1 week ago in Noteworthy. 4 Comments

FinalistTorsten and I are feeling very honored by the announcement that Spring IDE is one of the finalist in the ‘Best Open Source Eclipse-Based Developer Tool’ category of this year’s Eclipse Community Awards. We really value the announcement and see this is as great recognition of the work we have put into Spring IDE during the last four years. Thanks to the Eclipse Foundation and the judges.

Additionally I’m very excited to see EclEmma as the other finalist in that category. EclEmma is one of those tools I use myself very frequently and I think it adds great value to the Eclipse Community. Therefore regardless what project takes the award at the end I’m looking forward to meeting with Marc R. Hoffmann, the creator of EclEmma, and the other nominees at EcliseCon and hope that we’ll find some time for a beer or two.

Speaking about EclipseCon I think it is going to be an amazing week; there’ll be lots of Spring-related stuff to see and unveil.

Update: The results are out. Congratulations to the EclEmma project for winning the Eclipse Community Award for Best Open Source Developer Tool.

Introducing Spring IDE Screen Casts

Published by Christian 2 months, 3 weeks ago 0 Comments

Today I uploaded three new screen casts that should help getting started with Spring IDE.

If - after watching the casts - you feel like you need to install Spring IDE make sure that you follow the installation instructions.

Support for Imports and Tooling Annotations

Published by Christian 3 months ago in Journal and Noteworthy. 0 Comments

With the imminent release of Spring IDE 2.0.3 we are going to introduce two new features that I’m going to outline in this post.

Support for the import Element

Probably the most requested feature to add to Spring IDE is supporting <import /> elements in Spring configuration files. Up to now imports have been ignored by Spring IDE’s internal parser due to some limitations we had with the way Spring Core handled the processing of imports and the non-trivial task of porting scanning facilities for the classpath*: protocol over to the Eclipse OSGi runtime.

Imports in the Spring Explorer

With Spring IDE 2.0.3 which will be released today we finally managed to add support for imports. So after upgrading to 2.0.3 you will eventually notice a new setting on the preference page that allows to explicitly enable the import support (see screenshot below).

Import enablement preference

After enabling the import support you might end up with error messages like: Overrides another bean ‘X’ in config set ‘Y’. That can occur if you are using an Beans Config Set to group configuration files in order to simulate the runtime behavior of imports. The error is due to the fact that one configuration file imports another file that is also part of the same config set and is now being added to the set multiple times: using an import and directly using the preference page.

To get rid of that you need to either ‘Enable Bean Override’ in the Config Set preference page or remove the configuration files from the config set. There might not even be the need for a config set any more.

Detection of Tooling Annotations in Namespace Schemas

Since the Introduction of the XSD-based configuration style in 2.0 of Spring a tooling specific namespace has been available. The <tool:* /> namespace defines meta data that can be used to annotate your own custom namespaces elements. These annotations are good to describe that a configuration element exposes a bean of a certain type or that an attribute takes class or interface names or bean references.

Spring IDE 2.0.3. will look for those annotations and automatically provide content assist and hyperlinking in the XML editor and create beans in the Spring structure model displayed in the Spring Explorer and used during validation. There is no need to implement a custom Eclipse plug-in to get support for an extension namespace.

You can see an example of tool annotation usage in the oxm namespace of Spring Web Services.

Content assist an annotated attribute

In order to read the annotations Spring IDE looks up XSD schema files from the Eclipse XML Catalog. Therefore it is important that the XSD is known in the catalog and recognized by the XML editor. You can easily test if the schema is correctly installed by using code completion on the custom namespace elements or attributes.

Eclipse XML Catalog