I’m a Visual Studio .NET developer who’s trying to switch to Eclipse/SpringSource Tool Suite, so I get stuck on probably simple problems. Please bear with me.
I’m working on a Spring MVC project associated with an Apache Tomcat server. If I right-click the server and choose Start (alternatively Package Explorer->right-click project->Run As->Run on Server), my project is compiled and started. Compiler output is shown in Console window. Fine.
But if I simply want to compile the project without running it, I try selecting Project->Build All, Project->Build Project, or Project->Build Working Set. Nothing happens, no screen output, nothing — despite having non-compiling code.
I expected to see the compiler errors on screen, preferably with the errors highlighted in the code. For what it’s worth, I have deselected Project->Build Automatically. Anybody knows what I should do?
Eclipse and STS use incremental compilation. So, every time a file is saved, it is automatically compiled (as well as all files dependent on it). When you deselect Build Automatically, then yes, you will need to explicitly build, but this will still be an incremental build (ie- only the changed files and dependencies).
See here for a bit of a discussion on how incremental building works in Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Builders/builders.html