I just got a book from Apress (Spring Recipes), and I started to learn the Spring framework and now I have a problem. I followed the steps in the book to add the Spring .jar-s to the build path. Everything seems to work fine, but the code I have just doesn’t work.
My question is that: do you know about a good tutorial for integrating Spring with Eclipse? I googled for a while and I only found old tutorials (from 2007-2009) which just doesn’t work with Eclipse 3.6.
STS helps hugely (you can get it from the Eclipse Marketplace for free). The features of it I particularly like? Here’s a few:
As a user of XML-based configuration I love having the bean graph visualized – it’s great for reports – but the content assist when filling out bean properties is invaluable, both for names and for values (i.e., it makes writing that much XML not suck too much). I imagine that if you’re heavily using autowiring or Java configuration it’s less useful.
Refactoring support is also good (these days; it used to have bad bugs so you want to be patched up to date) and I’ve found that the pointcut search to be the only way to write a complex aspect without lots of round-trip testing.
But not all of STS is perfect. In particular, some of the content assist modes don’t (seem to) help (me) that much, and it really only works well if you have your properties defined using public setters. Still, it helps a lot…