Spring Tool Suite & Groovy/Grails Tool Suite 3.6.0: New and Noteworthy
General Updates
Distribution changes to be Eclipse Luna 4.4 and skip native installers
While we still provide update repositories and Eclipse Marketplace entries that allow you to install and update Eclipse 3.7-4.3 based versions of STS and GGTS, we are shipping the pre-build distributions based on the latest Eclipse version only from now on. This is going to be Eclipse Luna 4.4 for STS/GGTS 3.6.0.
In addition to that we also reduce the number of download variants and will provide 64bit and 32bit zipped downloads of STS and GGTS only. There will be no native installers for STS/GGTS anymore.
Eclipse Luna and Java8
Eclipse Luna is the first version of Eclipse to include Java8 support built right in (it was previously available as a separate patch for Eclipse Kepler). The full New and Noteworthy for Eclipse Luna is accessible here.
Pivotal tc Server Developer Edition updated to 2.9.6
STS and GGTS now ship with the latest Pivotal tc Server Developer Edition 2.9.6.
Groovy/Grails updates
- GGTS now ships with Grails 2.4.2
- Grails 2.4 requires Groovy 2.3 and Groovy 2.3.3 is included in this release.
- Groovy 2.3 is the first version of Groovy to properly support Java 8.
- Groovy 2.3 includes a new traits feature and preliminary support for this is also in 3.6.0.
Spring Tooling
The New Spring Starter Project wizard now provides additional option:
- Choose Gradle or Maven
- Choose 'war' or 'jar' packaging
- Choose Java Version: 1.6, 1.7, 1.8
- Choose language Java or Groovy
- More Spring Boot starters to choose from in the 'Style' section
Gradle Tooling
Gradle Tasks view now displays description for each task.
Quick Tasks Launcher action now has Alt-Shift-Ctrl-R key binding associated with it.
Content assist for Gradle tasks Quick Tasks Launcher dialog and Gradle Tasks Launch Configuration is now activated on the input of any any alpha-numeric character from the keyboard.
Miscellaneous
Issues resolved in this release
Here is a full list of resolved bugs and enhancement requests for 3.6.0:
Useful Links
Download STS: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all
Download GGTS: https://spring.io/tools/ggts/all
STS/GGTS forum: https://forum.spring.io/forum/spring-projects/springsource-tool-suite
STS/GGTS Issue tracker: https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS
Known issues in this release
Check for Updates throws an error when updating from STS 3.5.1
Doing a "Check for Updates" of STS to an existing installation throws an error about a problem with the Groovy-Eclipse JDT patch feature. In that case, disable the Groovy-Eclipse JDT patch feature from the list of components to update and continue.
Dashboard and Retina Displays
When running STS/GGTS on top of a JDK7, the new dashboard looks a bit blurry when using a HiRes (Retina) display, for example on a Retina MacBook Pro. This is due to the underlying browser technology that is used to display the dashboard content and that is coming from JavaFX. The JavaFX version that ships with JDK7 doesn't support retina displays. The solution for this is to run STS/GGTS on top of a JDK8 build. The JavaFX version that comes with JDK8 supports retina displays.
Setting the JDK
STS and GGTS requires a JDK to run on top of. Nevertheless the native launcher component might pick up a JRE automatically if you don't specifiy which JDK to run STS/GGTS on top of. To avoid this, you can specify the JDK in the sts.ini file that comes with your STS/GGTS installation. Add a line at the beginning "-vm" and an additional line below that which points to the "javaw" executable of the JDK on your machine.
Issues on Linux (GTK3)
Eclipse 4.4, upon which STS and GGTS are based, is the first Eclipse release where GTK3 is the default for the SWT widget library. There are some issues with this still:
- STS New Dashboard doesn't work under GTK3 because it uses JavaFX which is not currently compatible with GTK3. Instead the old dashboard will open.
- The Eclipse editor may be slow to respond (Eclipse Bug 434898).
You may also experience other UI rendering glitches. If you exprience any of these problems you can avoid them by forcing SWT to switch back to using GTK2. Just set the environment variable "SWT_GTK3=0" before launching STS or GGTS.