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.

Nevertheless we have some new features to try out:

Support for Spring Security 2

Editing <*>elements in XML now gives the usual content assist and navigation support. Furthermore method-level security configurations based on the new element are feed into Spring IDE’s AOP visualization tools so that you can get UI feedback where your security constraints apply.

Basic Support for @Autowired

Based on Jared Rodriguez’ contribution Spring IDE now detects bean dependencies based on the @Autowired and @Resource annotations. I would like to encourage everyone to try out this new feature while it is in incubation and help to improve it. Join the discussion at IDE-148 and leave your comment.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank Jared for his contribution and to welcome him as a committer on the project.

The 2.0.5 is available for download immediately from Eclipse update site. And yeah, Spring IDE will work on Eclipse 3.4 if you get it installed. Let me know how that works for you.

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.

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 Bean Support Features (mov - 55mb)
• Introducing AOP Features (mov - 24mb)
• Spring IDE’s Mylyn Integration (mov - 8mb)

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

If you haven’t played with Mylyn yourself you can learn more about it by watching the Eclipse Live Mylyn 2.2 webinar.

Since Spring IDE’s Mylyn integration is already around for a couple of months and we haven’t gotten a single comment or JIRA issue with on that, I thought it might be good to promote it a with broader audience. The aim of this integration is to give developers all the advantages of Mylyn’s Task-focused Interface while working with Spring XML configuration files.

Currently the integration features a Mylyn Structure Bridge at allows Mylyn to add Spring configuration elements - e.g. beans, properties or constructor-args - to the task context. We have added a Focus Filter to the Spring Explorer as well as to the Beans Cross References View that lets you filter those elements that are not relevant to the task. Furthermore the content assist proposals in the XML editor are reordered based on the proposal’s level of interest that is recorded in the task context (see screenshot above). Last but not least we made interest-based code folding for Spring configuration files work in WTP’s XML editor.
I’ve created a screencast that shows the Spring IDE and Mylyn Integration in more detail. The screencast outlines some of the AOP support features too and shows the upcoming support Spring’s <import /> element.

Check out the screencast here and leave a comment if you saw something interesting.