IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1: What’s New for Spring Developers

With every update we keep on improving our Spring frameworks support. In IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1 we focused on Spring Boot and plain Java-config configurations experience (of course, in addition to addressing other reported issues). During the EAP we already mentioned better Spring Boot support. In this post, we’d like to provide more details on improvements for Spring MVC, Spring Data and Spring Core.

Spring MVC

We’ve added support for @EnableWebMvc  annotation:

Now working with annotation-based Spring MVC projects is fully supported as IntelliJ IDEA detects and configures Spring facet automatically:

As you’d expect, there’s smart code completion in the corresponding setup methods:

Editor Gutter Icons

All Spring-related gutter icons can now be configured via Settings:

Changing Active Profile

We’ve also added a new action called Change Active Spring Profiles allowing you to change the active profile for a selected module or the entire project in one step.

Spring Data

Non-annotated beans extending CrudRepository  now are resolved correctly.

Spring Core

• The aliases defined with @AliasFor  for @Bean , @Import  and @ContextConfiguration  are fully supported now.
• We’ve added support for @EnableBatchProcessing , @EnableLoadTimeWeaving  and @EnableSpringDataWebSupport .
• New for Spring 4.3: @Autowired  is not required if the bean defines only one constructor.
• The facet configuration now processes context dependencies recursively.
• Also, we’ve fixed a great number of issues related to autowiring.
• Performance has been significantly improved for projects using Spring AOP and Spring MVC.
• Developers having a large number of XML configuration files will notice great decrease in memory usage.
• See the complete list of resolved issues.