The Spring IDE has a New Update Site

Edit July 2011: It seems the springide.org address is back up and running again, please post a comment on this post and I’ll monitor the situation. As of today, you can do the following:

  1. Help/Install New Sofware
  2. Add… button, then “http://springide.org/updatesite” (without the quotes) for both the name and location
  3. Click “Core/Spring IDE”
  4. Click “Next”, “Next” and accept the licence, then finish.

On the Spring Fundamentals course, we look at the Spring IDE. The name is a bit misleading, it’s really just a plug in for Eclipse rather than a full blown IDE.

Nonetheless, it is still a powerful plug in. As well as validating your XML configuration (so you can trap wiring errors without running the application), you can also see a very well presented graph of your beans, making it very easy to spot wiring problems.

However, since we recorded the course the URL of the update site has changed (springide.org now gives 404 errors).

The correct update site is now https://dist.springframework.org/release/IDE.

(I should note that SpringSource, the company founded by the creators of the Spring Framework also supply a full IDE based around Spring and Eclipse called the SpringSource Tool Suite. We didn’t cover this on the course, so see https://www.springsource.com/products/sts for full details).

11 thoughts on “The Spring IDE has a New Update Site”

  1. Hey Richard. Can I ask you – why would I use the Spring IDE when there is STS available?

    Great course btw – am about half way through and although I've used spring a little before it is all now starting to make much more sense!!

    Mo

  2. SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) is a full development environment. It is still based on Eclipse, but with lots of preinstalled plugins and a full branding (eg the splash screen).

    It goes far beyond the basic Spring IDE plugin, including support for OSGi and integrations with application servers.

    As it's a full IDE, its certainly "heavier" than basic Eclipse. Many projects will not want to commit to changing their entire development environment if all you need to do is view bean graphs.

    Also, STS is a commercial tool (it's a free download these days, but still commercial), and this could be a problem for many projects.

    So I'm not recommending one over the other, but SpringIDE is simpler and more lightweight to install and use and I've always been happy to use it on real work.

    Having said that, the Spring IDE seems to becoming less popular over time, and I wonder if it is on it's way to deprecation given that the springide.org domain is no longer accessible?

  3. Hi Richard,

    I am going through your course and it is gr8! I am enjoying it and I am stuck up with integrating Spring IDE plugin with eclipse. I tried my best to find the latest one and I did not find it. I also tried the link that you have mentioned which is
    http://dist.springframework.org/release/IDE
    I think it has been changed now. Can you please help me on this?

  4. Hi Anish,

    Really sorry I missed your question, until recently I didn't have email notification of comments.

    I've just checked the dist.springframework.org site and it appears to be working fine. Also, it seems the old springide.org url has a redirect set up.

    Please let me know if you're still having problems (or contact us through the contact link on the virtualpairprogrammers.com website).

    Cheers,
    Rich.

  5. Taking the course 5/21/2020, none of the Spring IDE sites listed work for the basic Spring IDE.

    1. Heh sorry about this, I hadn’t realised you’d commented before I sent you this link in my PM to you!

      It does appear that they’ve quietly buried the SpringIDE standalone plugin now. You can safely ignore it, it was a nice to have when learning Spring but you won’t miss it much to be honest.

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