FAQ
[Updated] We will continue to ship updates for STS 3.9.x as a full distribution until mid of 2020 and will update the distribution to the upcoming Eclipse releases (2020-03 and 2020-06). In case you still need important parts of the old tooling in Eclipse that haven’t been supported in Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, you will be able to install those parts as add-on features into the Spring Tools 4 Eclipse distribution and those parts will continue to receive maintenance updates until mid of 2020. After mid of 2020, the old STS 3.9.x tooling will receive no maintenance updates anymore.
Yes, the Spring Tools 4 are ready for usage with the latest Spring Boot versions as well as the latest Spring Framework versions.
The ready-to-use Spring Tools 4 distribution on top of Eclipse includes the standard Java language tooling of Eclipse out-of-the-box. For Visual Studio Code, you should install the Java Extension Pack, which is a combination of the regular Java language tooling (provided from RedHat and Eclipse) and the launching, testing, and debugging support for Java for Visual Studio Code (from Microsoft). For Theia, you can use the same Java extensions as you would install into Visual Studio Code.
Yes. While you need to use a JDK 11+ to run the Spring Tools 4 language servers this is independent of the Java version used to run and build the code in your own projects. Use the vscode settings of the form ${language-server-name}.ls.java.home to control what JVM is used to launch our language servers and refer to VSCode-Java extension documentation to control the JRE configurations used for building and launching code from your own projects.
Yes, you can use Lombok in your projects when using the Spring Tools 4 in the various environments.
No. We implemented a prototype to integrate the Spring Tools 4 with IntelliJ IDEA, but the third-party support for the language server protocol for IntelliJ isn’t mature, stable, and feature-rich enough to implement a meaningful version of the Spring Tools 4 for IntelliJ yet. However, there is awesome support for Spring available out-of-the-box in the IntelliJ Ultimate Edition that you can use instead if you prefer IntelliJ.
We don’t have exact plans yet, but we constantly monitoring the language server community for new and emerging clients and environments that might be good candidates for the Spring Tools 4.
The Spring Tools 4 run as extensions for VSCode, Theia, and Eclipse as so called "language-servers" in their own processes. Those processes are created as soon as the client (the editor or IDE) detects a situation where the extension can be useful and kicks-off that additional process. This has a number of benefits (a crashing extension can't crash the editor or the IDE).
The total number of processes that are being created depends on the client. VSCode usually starts just one language server process per workspace window for each language server type. The Eclipse integration behaves in a similar way. The processes can be found via jps, since they are all JVM processes. The name of the process will be something like '${server-type}-language-server-${version}.jar'.
If you install a fresh and ready-to-use STS 4.0.1 distribution, the Apache Tomcat server adapters are included by default again. If you have an older version of STS4 installed, it doesn't contain those adapters out of the box, since we tried to reduce the overall size of the distribution for various reasons (reduced startup time, reduced size, etc.). If you want to get the Apache Tomcat server adaptors back, you can install the JST Server Adaptor features from the main Eclipse 2018-09 p2 repository via Install New Software, select the main Eclipse update site (the right one depends on the base Eclipse version that you have, but it will show up in the drop-down list for you, either the Eclipse Photon one or the Eclipse 2018-09 one), scroll down the list, expand the Web category, and select the JST Server Adaptor features.
As with the Apache Tomcat server adapters, we don't include everything by default in the distribution anymore, especially those pieces that we think the majority of our users don't need. But our assumptions might be wrong from time to time, so please continue to let us know what else you are missing. The JSP editing support is one of those features. But you can get it back into your STS4 via Install New Software, select the 2018-09 p2 repository, and check the Eclipse Java Web Developer Tools, they will bring you the JSP editing back.
Here are the options to workaround Path too long problem on Win with STS4:
- Use 7zip to unzip the downloaded STS4 zip file
- Use JRE to unzip the downloaded STS4 zip file:
jar xf spring-tool-suite-4-4.3.0.RELEASE-e4.12.0-win32.win32.x86_64.zip - Edit Windows registry to enable long paths thus Windows standard zip archiver would work. See intructions below to edit the Windows registry:
- Type
RegEditin the Win 10 search and open theRegEditapp - Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystemin the tree (left pane) - Find
LongPathsEnabledsetting in the right pane (should be set 0 by default). Set it to '1' by right-clicking and thenModify
(Create the setting key-value pair if it's not there) - Restart your PC