Spring Tool Suite & Groovy-Grails Tool Suite 3.2.0.M1: New and Noteworthy

General Updates

Performance Improvements

We are working on improving performance all over the place in STS and GGTS. At the same time, the Eclipse platform team is also working on solving performance issues in the new platform UI implementation, also known as the Eclipse 4.2 platform. STS/GGTS 3.2.0.M1 is still built on top of Eclipse Juno SR1, which doesn't contain most of the performance fixes that the Eclipse team is working on. We plan to adopt the latest changes with STS/GGTS 3.2.0.M2 (planned for end of January 2013) or at latest for the 3.2.0 release (scheduled for early March 2013). In the meantime, we recommend to to use the STS/GGTS builds on top of Eclipse 3.8.

vFabric tc Server Developer Edition updated to 2.8.1

STS and GGTS now ships with the latest vFabric tc Server Developer Edition 2.8.1.


Spring Development Tools

Live Beans Graph

For this milestone release, the Live Beans Graph has switched to a horizontal tree layout. We plan to continue to optimize the graph layout as we evolve the Live Beans Graph feature.

A new popup menu has been introduced to allow users to switch between applications that have been loaded in the Live Beans Graph view. We have also added a refresh button to the view's tool bar that will retrieve anew the Spring beans model and redraw the graph.

The Live Beans Graph feature requires applications to be running Spring Framework 3.2. Applications that do not support this feature will now appear greyed-out in the tc Server Live Beans Graph applications list.

Regular expression support for &at;RequestMapping validation

We now support regular expressions inside path variables when validating @RequestMapping annotations.

Support for Spring Integration 2.2

The Spring Integration visual editor component of the Spring Config Editor has been updated to support Spring Integration 2.2 and its new adapters. Below is an example that uses the Spring Integration Mongo adapter.


vFabric tc Server Integration for Eclipse

Update to support tc Server 2.8.1

Support for the latest vFabric tc Server Developer Edition 2.8.1. has been added.

Improvements to tc Server instance creation wizard

The wizard now allows to use existing instance from any location on your disk. In addition, if you want to create a new instance it lets you choose any location for it.


Groovy and Grails Development Tools

Better handling of built-in AST transforms

Groovy-Eclipse now has editing support for the following built-in AST transforms including: @Bindable, @Vetoable, @ListenerList, @Log, and @AutoExternalize

Formatter improvements

Now you have more explicit control over how lists are formatted. Long lists are wrapped so that each element is on a single line and short lists are all on one line. From the Groovy -> Formatter preferences page, you can define the number of characters a long list.

Below, you can see the preferences page where you can set this option:

Groovy -> Formatting preferences page

And by setting the long list length to be 30 characters, the following is formatted, with the upper list being wrapped, with the lower list staying on the same line:

Formatting long and short lists

Additionally, we have fixed many bugs in this area and your formatting experiences should be greatly improved.


AspectJ Development Tools

Performance improvements

We have made some significant performance improvements to the AJ builder. Your AspectJ-enabled projects will now build faster. As an example, using STS 3.1.0, a full build of the Spring Data Neo4j project took about 5 minutes. With STS 3.2.0.M1, the same build takes just under 3 minutes. This was informally tested using a MacBook Pro with 8Gb of ram. The performance improvements are around how Eclipse maps files between the filesystem and the workspace, so projects with many files will see larger improvements.


Issues resolved in this release

Here is a full list of resolved bugs and enhancement requests for the 3.2.0.M1:

STS/GGTS issue tracker

Spring IDE issue tracker

Groovy-Eclipse issue tracker


Useful Links

Download STS: https://www.springsource.org/spring-tool-suite-download

Download GGTS: https://grails.org/products/ggts

STS/GGTS forum: https://forum.spring.io/forumdisplay.php?32-SpringSource-Tool-Suite

STS/GGTS Issue tracker: https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS


New and Noteworthy for previous releases

STS/GGTS 3.1.0

STS/GGTS 3.0.0

STS 2.9.2

STS 2.8.1

STS 2.7.2

STS 2.7.1.SR1

STS 2.5.2.SR1