Updates and New/Enhanced Features
Eclipse Photon (4.8.0)
The default STS distribution is now based on the recently released Eclipse Photon (4.8.0) release, including support for JDK9 and JDK10 and a number of performance and memory usage improvements. Details about the Eclipse release can be found here: Eclipse Photon New & Noteworthy.
Pivotal tc Server updated to 4.0.1
The Pivotal tc Server Developer Edition that comes with the STS distribution bundle got updated to the latest tc Server version 4.0.1.
Early Access: Spring Tools 4 Public Beta extension for STS 3.9.x
At last years SpringOne Platform conference, we announced the public beta access for the upcoming all-new next generation of the Spring tooling, called Spring Tools 4. If you haven't had the chance to take a look, here is the Spring Tools 4 website.
In case you want to learn more, here is a great Spring Tip video that Josh Long recorded about the now available public beta of the all-new Spring Tools 4:
There is also the full recording of the talk at SpringOne Platform 2017 available on YouTube:
While the Spring Tools 4 Public Beta (and the Spring Tools 4 in general) come as a totally new and independent distribution of Eclipse (called the Spring Tool Suite 4), extensions for Visual Studio Code and Atom, we also offer an early access extension pack for the now-released STS 3.9.5 distribution (via an Extension Install listing on the STS dashboard). You can add this extension pack to your STS 3.9.5 install to get an early impression of the new tooling - and provide feedback, of course.
Please keep in mind that the new Spring Tools 4 distribution will replace the existing STS 3.9.x distributions in late 2018 and will require a fresh install of the Spring Tools 4.
Important Changes and Fixes
Issues now tracked on GitHub Issues
Issues around the Spring Tool Suite and the Spring IDE are tracked on GitHub from now on: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-ide/issues.
Thanks for using the automatic error reporting
We would also like to thank our users for using the automated error reporting that we included since the 3.8.2 release and for sending us all those error reports. We used them to fix issues and improve reliability in this release. And we will continue to do that. So please keep those error reports coming!
In case you see a notification showing up that our error report quota exceeded, don't be surprised. With support from
CodeTrails, we use a limited plan for this error reporting facility - and that might cause our quota to exceed
from time to time. If you want to switch off those notifications, please go to the Preferences -> General ->
Notifications.
Manual Maven support going to be removed soon
We plan to remove the support for manual Maven projects from STS and Spring IDE in future versions of STS and Spring IDE. The manual maven support was used in the past when projects used Maven, but didn't opt-in to use the direct Maven support in Eclipse via the m2e project. While projects can still decide to not use m2e for their projects, the support for that via additional menu actions in STS will be gone.
Download STS: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all
Spring Tools Issue tracker: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-ide/issues
This is due to a bug in the Eclipse Photon platform which affects older versions of GTK. For details refer to the Eclipse Bug. Note that the same bug also affects some core eclipse functionalities such as, for example, the Eclipse Debugger's Expressions View.
Deleting certain Eureka service instances, like p-service-registry in Pivotal Web Services, from boot dashboard Cloud Foundry targets may experience problems with timeouts. The same issue may be found when deleting them from Eclipse Tools for Cloud Foundry (CFT). A workaround is to use the cf CLI to delete these service instances.
STS 3.9.5 can run on top of a JDK out-of-the-box. However, please notice that the Maven support in Eclipse/STS runs within the JVM of the IDE and therefore also uses the JDK9/10 runtime. While that isn't necessarily a problem, having Maven modules in your build that aren't compatible with Java 9 might cause your project build to fail in Eclipse/STS.
This is the case, for example, if you use Spring Boot 1.5.x or earlier versions, which uses an older version of the Maven jar plugin, which fails when running on top of a Java 9/10 VM. In that case we recommend to configure Eclipse/STS to run on top of a Java 8 runtime (by modifying the eclipse.ini or sts.ini file accordingyly).
The Spring Boot Dashboards ngrok tunnel feature doesn't work yet with remote service registries from Spring Cloud Services. Instead it works with self-deployed Eureka service registry apps on CF only (as described here). We are working on enhancing the ngrok tunnel feature to directly support Spring Cloud Services in the near future. In the meantime we published a tech note that describes how to setup ngrok tunneling in combination with SCS manually.
Workaround is open launch configuration for the Boot App. Navigate to Spring Boot tab and enter a boot property into "Override Properties" table. For example server.port and value 8080. Save the launch configuration and re-launch your Boot App.
STS 3.9.5 requires a JDK8/9/10 to run on top of. If you are running it with an older JDK this may not be immediatlely apparant, but some of STS functionality will simply be 'absent' because the corresponding plugins are automatically disabled by OSGI because their requirements are not satisfied at runtime. See also below 'Setting the JDK'.
STS 3.9.5 requires a JDK8/9/10 to run on top of. Nevertheless the native Eclipse launcher component might pick up a JRE or an older JDK automatically if you don't specify which JDK to run STS on top of. To avoid this, you can specify the JDK in the sts.ini file that comes with your STS 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. Here is a detailed explanation how to configure the JVM in the ini file.