Spring IDE
Spring IDE enhances a regular Eclipse IDE with tooling for building Spring-based applications. It makes your Eclipse IDE Spring-aware and adds code-completion, validation, content-assist, and quick-fixes to all different kinds of Spring-related artifacts (Spring configuration files, Spring annotations, etc.). It also contains support for refactoring, Spring AOP and AspectJ, auto-wiring, Spring Batch, Spring Integration, Spring Security, and Spring Webflow, and is integrated with Eclipse Mylyn.
It also comes with the Spring Dashboard is an optional component, which brings you up-to-date information about SpringSource-related projects as well as an easy-to-use extension install to get additional tooling add-ons, like the Pivotal tc Server Integration for Eclipse or the Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse.
Installation (Release)
First, you can install Spring IDE from the Eclipse Marketplace into your existing Eclipse installation. Second, you can install Spring IDE manually from this udpate site:
http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/update/e4.7 (for Eclipse Neon 4.7) http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/update/e4.8 (for Eclipse Mars 4.8)
The latest versions of Spring IDE support Eclipse Oxygen and Photon. Older versions of Spring IDE for older versions of Eclipse can be found here:
http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/update/e4.6 (for Eclipse 4.6) http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/update/e4.5 (for Eclipse 4.5) http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/update/e4.4 (for Eclipse 4.4) http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/update/e4.3 (for Eclipse 4.3) http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/update/e3.8 (for Eclipse 3.8) http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/update/e3.7 (for Eclipse 3.7)
However, we do not support those older versions of Spring IDE anymore.
Installation (Milestone)
You can install the latest milestone build of the Spring IDE manually from this udpate site:
https://dist.springframework.org/milestone/IDE/
Installation (CI builds)
If you want to live on the bleading egde, you can also install always up-to-date continuous integration buids from this update site:
http://dist.springframework.org/snapshot/IDE/nightly/
But take care, those builds could be broken from time to time and might contain non-ship-ready features that might never appear in the milestone or release builds.
Getting started
There is a webinar online that is focused introductory material for Spring itself and the Spring Tool Suite, which contains Spring IDE, and is therefore a good point to start if you never used Spring tooling before:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7B74449D5224CC99
Questions and bug reports:
If you have a question that Google can't answer, the best way is to go to the stackoverflow
using the tag spring-tool-suite:
http://stackoverflow.com/tags/spring-tool-suite[`spring-tool-suite`]
Bug reports and enhancement requests are tracked using GitHub issues here:
https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-ide/issues
Developing Spring IDE
If you wanna work on the project itself, the best way is to install Spring IDE into your Eclipse target platform and start from there, using the standard Eclipse way of plugin development using PDE. You can clone the Spring IDE git repository and import the projects into your Eclipse workspace and start using them.
Building Spring IDE
The Spring IDE project uses Maven Tycho to do continuous integration builds and to produce p2 repos and update sites. To build Spring IDE itself, you can execute:
mvn -Pe47 clean install