The Spring IDE is nearing release of version 2.0 and Rod Johnson has posted an update on their progress. Spring IDE is a set of plugins for Eclipse that provide a GUI for Spring's configuration files. A NetBeans Spring IDE is also beginning.
For projects with large Spring configuration files, Spring IDE provides benefits such as incremental validation of config files and a graph showing all of the beans and their relationships. Johnson talk about how Spring IDE has built on some of the less visible work that went into Spring 2.0:
The advances in Spring IDE are particularly nice to see given that they are partly a payoff for some of the less visible work the core Spring team did in Spring 2.0. While there are plenty of enhancements visible on the surface, a lot of work also went into making the core container more extensible and more toolable. Juergen Hoeller and Rob Harrop did a lot behind the scenes to allow the addition of tooling metadata to Spring's internal BeanDefinition metadata, and allow container configuration to be accessed without instantiating bean classes (or even having access to bean classes at all - a problem when implementing an Eclipse plugin). Torsten Juergeleit, the founder of Spring IDE, has built a solid abstraction on top of the enhanced Spring metadata, and it's great to see that this is now allowing cool functionality to be added to Spring IDE very quickly.
2.0 Milestone 1 was released in December with Milestone 2 due out today. Some of the highlights of the 2.0 release include:
- Support for Spring 2.0 XSD-based bean definition files in the core model and the BeansXmlEditor
- A brand new BeansExplorer
- Support for Spring AOP based on AspectJ Expression Pointcuts and @AspectJ-style aspects
For NetBeans users, Diro announced a NetBeans Spring IDE last month, and posted two screencasts of it yesterday. He hopes to have the project on SourceForge in the next few weeks.
Oracle also today released a Spring extension for JDeveloper. The extension provides
- Automatic Spring library configuration
- Spring beans.xml file creation wizard - with automatic project configuration
- Editing features for the various Spring XML files including code completion, visual construction, etc