STS3 Features

This section explains the relationship between STS3 and Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse (aka STS4).

STS3 and STS4 share some features

The default Spring Tools 4 distribution for Eclipse (aka STS4) comes with several components pre-installed that you are well familiar with from using STS3. Those components/features are:

• Boot Dashboard
• Snippet Completion Proposals for Request Mappings
• Spring Properties and YAML file editing support (although the Spring Tools 4 version is slightly different)
• Conversion of Spring Properties file to YAML file
• Spring Starter wizard (https://start.spring.io)
• Import Getting Started Content wizard (https://spring.io/guides)
• Quick Search

STS3 features not present in STS4, but have a (better) successor in Spring Tools 4

Request Mappings View

Open Symbol in Workspace features replaces it. Once the Open Symbol in Workspace dialog is opened type @/ to see all Request Mappings in the workspace.

Live Beans Graph View

There is no graph for the Live Beans, but there is information about Live Beans available in a different form:

• Live Bean data is available via Boot highlights, hovers and Code Lenses in the source code
• List of Live beans data is shown in the Beans tab in the Properties View for a selected running Boot application

STS3 features that are NOT present in Spring Tools 4

Since Spring Tools 4 is re-implemented from scratch, the tooling had a sharp focus for the initial release. Spring Tools 4 focus on supporting Spring developers using Spring Boot and annotation-style Spring programming. Therefore, the following features of STS3 were NOT supported in the initial releases of the Spring Tools 4:

• Spring XML config validations
• advanced content-assist in Spring XML config files
• advanced refactoring refactoring in Spring XML config files

Since version 4.1.1, the Spring Tools 4 started to include early experimental support and first steps towards proving support for Spring XML configuration files and non-Boot projects and version 4.2.1 followed up with that by adding early (and limited) support for content-assist for certain elements of Spring XML config files. You can follow the progress here:

• XML config support in STS4 (#108)
• make Spring Tools 4 features available for non-boot Spring apps (#96)

Combining STS3 and STS4

In case you would like to continue to use specific features of STS3 that are not part of STS4 yet and use the new Spring Tools 4 at the same time, you can apply two different strategies:

• use separate workspaces and continue to use STS3 for specific workspaces while using STS4 for new workspaces
• install STS3 components into an STS4 installation

Installing STS3 into STS4

You can install the old STS3 tooling into an existing Spring Tools 4 distribution and use both side-by-side in the same workspace. This is not strongly recommended, but possible and supported.

In order to achieve that, you can use a fresh Spring Tools 4 distribution for Eclipse and go to the Eclipse Marketplace to install the "STS3 Add-On Extension" item. It will install all the well-known STS3 components into your Spring Tools 4 installation.

This works for the Eclipse-based distribution of the Spring Tools 4 only. There is no way to install or use STS3 components in Visual Studio Code or Atom.