Dear Spring Community,

We're pleased to announce that we just released a service refresh for 2.5.2 as well as the second milestone build for the next release of the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS).

The service refresh for STS 2.5.2 includes:

• Update to Spring Roo 1.1.2 (including UAA update)
• Update to Eclipse Helios SR2 (3.6.2)
• Some backported Spring IDE bugfixes
• Update to Groovy 1.7.8
• Update to Grails 1.3.7

Some highlights from the new 2.6.0.M2 milestone:

• Update to Spring Roo 1.1.2 (including UAA update)
• Update to Eclipse Helios SR2 (3.6.2)
• Update to Groovy 1.7.8
• Update to Grails 1.3.7
• A Roo Plugin Manager
• Improved support for @RequestMapping (including refactoring, content-assist and quickfix)
• Tons of improvements for Groovy-Eclipse and Grails tooling

More details on new features and bug fixes can be found in the 2.6.0.M2 New and Noteworthy document. Detailed installation instructions are also available.

As always downloads are available from the STS download page.

The SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) provides the New Spring Template Project wizard. Uses this wizard, the user can see a number of project templates, choose one and let the wizard create a complete project, based on that template description. While this gives you an easy way to create new projects, you might wanna define your own custom project templates for your team or your organization. And we will show you how to do this in the following.

1. Step: Contribute a new resources extension to STS

STS creates the list of available project templates by downloading and reading resource XML files. To let STS know where those resource files are located, you need to contribute them to STS via an extension.

So the first step is to create a new and empty plugin project. You don't need Java code in there, so don't create this as a Java project. Just create a…