Spring IDE Blog

In his opening keynote at SpringOne, Rod announced - among Spring Roo and SpringSource tc Server GA - that we will make SpringSource Tool Suite available for free!

In case you wonder why you - as a Spring IDE user - should care about that, make sure that you check out STS and the extended features that it offers above and beyond Spring IDE.

The free downloads will be available by Thursday, May 7th. Stay tuned for more details. I hope that you are as excited as I: you can now get the best and most productive IDE environment for Spring-based application development for free.

From this point on you can follow me on twitter (#STS) to stay on top of all the new features and development around Spring-, OSGi- and Groovy/Grails-relating tooling.

Just in time for this year’s SpringOne Americas I released Spring IDE 2.2.1 to the update site at Amazon S3. This version is mainly a bug fix and maintenance release, but there are three changes that I’d like to highlight in this post.

But before I go into detail here are the usual download links:

• Update site: http://dist.springframework.org/release/IDE (this link does not work in a browser, but in your Eclipse update manager!)
• Archived update site: spring-ide_updatesite_2.2.1_v200811281800.zip
• Changelog: Release 2.2.1

Support for Workspace external configuration files

Since early versions Spring IDE wasn’t able to recognize XML configuration files from workspace external resources like JARs from classpath containers. Only JARs that were sitting inside a project could be searched for configuration files. This limitation is due to the fact that the Eclipse resource abstraction has no knowledge of external resources and provides no access to those. But Spring IDE heavily relies on this abstraction like so many other Eclipse plug-ins.

I finally ended up implementing a thin layer to integrate JARs from external locations into the resource abstraction to make Spring IDE able to open and parse those files.

Ignore missing NamespaceHandler warning

Although Spring IDE can easily be extended to support custom namespaces, there are a lot of frameworks out there that don’t ship or provide an integration. Normally that would end up in a “Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for element 'node name' of schema namespace 'uri'” warning in Eclipse or the SpringSource Tool Suite.

There is now a setting to disable this warning on the Project properties dialog.

Refactoring of Content Assist Infrastructure

If you are already in the business of extending Spring IDE’s namespace support you might want to take a closer look at the work that has been done for making the implementations of the IContentAssistCalculator more reusable. This refactoring will most likely break your extension depending on the extension approach you choose.

Making your extension compatible with the new API is not hard and should not involve a lot of changes. Please let me know if you run into any problem or need advice on how to migrate.

Compatibility with SpringSource Tool Suite

SpringSource Tool Suite 1.1.1 is not yet compatible with the 2.2.1 release of Spring IDE. Please don’t update!. We will release an updated version of STS shortly after SpringOne that will come with recent Spring IDE and will also feature lots of new Spring-related tooling.