Hope you enjoy!

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.

• Using Bundlor in Eclipse
• Getting Started with Bundlor
• Announcing SpringSource Tool Suite 2.0
• OSGi Development Tools in STS 2.0

In addition to STS 2.0 we also released Spring IDE 2.2.2 and dm Server Tools 1.1.2. You can install both from the well-known project update sites or use the more convinient consolidated SpringSource Eclipse update site at:

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.

As always the release is available from the update site hosted at Amazon S3. Here are the 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_2.2.0_v200809261800.zip
• Changelog: Release 2.2

This release introduces a first version of an incremental approach to model creation and validation. This will help to speed up the usual development cycle of edit-save-compile-validate by detecting structural changes to Java classes and only trigger project validation and re-creation of the AOP model if actually required. In essence you will not need to wait if you just change a method body.

After the Ganymede release some users had problems installing Spring IDE 2.0.6 into their shiny new 3.4 packages. This was basically due to incompatibilities between Spring IDE’s Mylyn integration and the Mylyn 3.0 APIs which changed quite significantly. Thanks to a rapid pair programming session with Mik Kersten, lead of the Mylyn project at Eclipse, we were able to make Mylyn 3.0 support available just hours after the Ganymede launch from the Spring IDE nighty update site (It is so much fun sharing an office with the Tasktop crew. If you are ever in Vancouver make sure to drop by for a coffee). Obviously an nightly snapshot build is not everybody’s preferred installation source; therefore I’m more than happy to announce that version 2.1 is now officially compatible with Eclipse 3.4 and Mylyn 3.0.

Besides the usual bug fixing that goes into every release and the fore-mentioned Mylyn and Eclipse migration, 2.1 now supports Spring Web Flow 2. We have added support for visual editing using the graphical Web Flow Editor as well as support for validating and editing of the XML flow definition files based on the 2.0 XML schema. It is important to note that 2.1 does not break the Web Flow 1.x support. So all Web Flow 1.x users out there: it is safe to upgrade to Spring IDE 2.1.

Another feature, rather small but requested quite often, is the ability to display nested beans in the Beans Dependency Graph. See the following screenshot for an example.

As always the release is available from the update site hosted at Amazon S3. Here are the 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_2.1.0_v200808011800.zip
• Changelog: Release 2.1

In closing I would like to mention that Spring IDE 2.1 serves as the foundation for the upcoming SpringSource Tool Suite 1.1 and SpringSource Application Platform Tools 1.0 release (later next week). Over the last months we have added extension points and APIs to Spring IDE that provide some nice and supported ways of extending the Spring structure model provided by Spring IDE.

The nightly build also contains a Mylyn Integration feature that is compatible with Eclipse Ganymede and the Mylyn 3.0 release.

Update: fixed the link to the update site. Please note that the link is intended to be used with the Eclipse update manager and not with your browser as Amazon S3 is not very browser friendly.

Point your Eclipse update manager to http://springide.org/updatesite or http://dist.springframework.org/release/IDE. You can use S3Browse to browse the Amanzon S3 bucket for archived update site zips.

Spring IDE 2.0.6 will be the last version that supports Mylyn 2.3. The port to Mylyn 3.0 APIs has already been finished and will be available in the next few days. This migration is required to make installing Spring IDE into the Ganymede packages possible. If you want to use 2.0.6 with Ganymede please don’t install the Mylyn integration.

This session will describe the integration of Skyway Software and SpringSource and how developers can use Skyway Builder to modify/customize existing Spring applications quickly and accurately. After a brief architectural review of Skyway?s and Spring?s tools, attendees will learn how to access Spring apps in Skyway Builder (using Eclipse), apply Skyway facets/natures, and autowire for Spring to redeploy the app to the same (or new) infrastructure. #

Skyway Builder is a very interesting product with its model centric design and development approach. And it fits nicely into the landscape of development tools for Spring, including Spring IDE and STS, as you will be able to see in the webinar.

You can register for this free webinar at the SpringSource website.

I will be giving a talk titled Enterprise Development Tools for Spring (abstract will be fixed soon abstract is now correct) in which I’ll introduce the different Spring-related development tools that SpringSource offers.

Furthermore I will explain where we draw the line between our open-source Spring IDE , the SpringSource Application Platform Tools and the SpringSource Tool Suite; I will outline what differentiates each product and how they work seamlessly together with Eclipse Mylyn and other Eclipse-based tools to offer the best Spring development environment.

Hope to see you in Antwerp.