Spring developers using Eclipse should take a close look at SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). STS is a FREE IDE, based on Eclipse with many of the essential tool to assist Spring developers. http://www.springsource.com/developer/sts. The major plugin to Eclipse is Spring IDE.

I recently authored the DZone RefCard – Eclipse Tools for Spring: The SpringSource Tool Suite. At Chariot Solutions, I teach the official Spring Courses. All the course material installs with STS and the student’s labs/solutions are configured within STS. With some of the more inquisitive students where I would be faced with questions about STS features that I did not truly understand. Like many developers, I don’t read manuals until I have to. What I discovered is that Eclipse plugin developers do not create full documentation, they write “New and Noteworthy” documents that address new features and product improvements. So, to get an understanding of what features are available and how they work, one has to read all of these documents to get an idea of the features available. There is not any comprehensive documentation available.

I am a huge fan of the DZone RefCardz. In six pages you get a nice quick start on a technology. Since I love to learn and share, this seemed like a great opportunity to focus on the core Spring features in STS.

My first attempt was to go through the menus and find the Spring specific features. This was helpful, but left many questions unanswered.

First Places to Look

• Right Click on a Project > Spring Tools
• Preferences > Spring

After a good chunk of time, I realized that this would be far more than 6 pages of material, so I narrowed the RefCard down to simply core Spring features.

Feature Categories

• Core Spring
• Spring & OSGi (formerly Spring Dynamic Modules & Spring dm Server)
• Spring Dashboard
• Groovy
• Grails
• Spring Roo
• Spring Batch
• Spring Integration
• Spring Web Flow
• tc Server
• CloudFoundry

Obviously, the essential items for core Spring are covered in the RefCard (space permitting).

Cool Stuff

• Visualizers
• Validation
• Spring Configuration, XML Content Assist
• Spring Focussed, Java Content Assist
• Spring AOP

I am planning on a series of ScreenCasts focussing on specific features of STS. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to contact me mailto:gdickens@chariotsolutions.com

From http://gordondickens.com/wordpress/2011/07/06/springsource-tool-suite-eclipse-for-spring-developers/