SpringSource—the company behind the open source Spring framework for Java—has officially released a new version of its commercial Eclipse-based development environment, the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). The new version brings improved tools to streamline application editing and accelerate Spring project development.
STS takes advantage of Mylyn, an open source Eclipse component that brings a task-oriented interface to the development environment. It is tightly integrated, allowing developers to navigate and manage their Spring projects in a manner that better reflects the natural development workflow.
The STS environment also provides extensive support for OSGi. This enables developers to manage certain aspects of deployment and the application life-cycle directly from Eclipse. The new version introduces deeper integration and new tools like graph visualizations for interactively navigating through dependency trees.
SpringSource tools team engineer Christian Dupuis, who leads the Spring IDE project, provided a more detailed overview of OSGi tooling improvements for STS in a recent blog entry.
"STS 2.0 provides new tools to analyze bundles and visualize their dependencies based on Import-/Export-Package relationships and Service consumption. The accessible information is similar to what users commonly get in textual form from the admin shell of an OSGi runtime, e.g. the Equinox Console," he wrote. "But the benefit of these new tools is that you get relevant information integrated in your development environment and have visual tools at hand to navigate and check your bundle meta data and wiring; there is no need to leave the IDE to open up a telnet session."
There are also several useful additions that boost editing efficiency, such as a visual system for editing XML content. I put the new version of STS to the test to see how it performs. Despite my lack of experience with Spring, I was able to get a project up and running without much difficulty. The environment includes simple project wizards that automate much of the setup and provide a functional testing environment.
STS also offers an excellent built-in tutorial system that will provide users with interactive step-by-step walkthroughs for various tasks. These features reduce the barriers to entry for new developers and make it easy for anyone who has experience with Java and Eclipse to dive in right away.
I spoke with Dupuis and SpringSource VP of engineering Peter Cooper Ellis about the features in the new version. They say that the goal is to deliver top-notch tools for commercial SpringSource users. One of their major development goals this year is to extend the environment and provide integrated support for Grails, a Groovy-based framework modeled after Ruby on Rails but built with Groovy, a dynamic programming language that targets the JVM and provides a more expressive syntax than Java.
STS is bundled with SpringSource's commercial offerings and a trial version is also available for evaluation purposes. For those of you who prefer a purely open source solution, some of the underlying editing components that are used in STS are available under the Eclipse license from the Spring IDE project.
Listing image by Michael Allen Smith
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