New releases of Spring Boot are being released on a quite frequent schedule and updating your projects to newer versions of Spring Boot is something that many teams and organizations around the globe do as part of their daily work.

Sometimes those upgrades are simple and easy, for example for new patch releases that mostly include changes to fix bugs and address CVEs. In contrast to that, upgrading to a new minor or even a new major version requires more work, including code changes to adapt to new or changed APIs, updating configurations to not use deprecated keys anymore, and more.

Each new minor or major version of Spring therefore ships with a comprehensive guide and documentation about those changes and you can read and follow to upgrade your project. A good example of this is the new migration guide for upgrading your projects to Spring Boot 3…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.17.1 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

fixes and improvements

• (Spring Boot) fixed: Eclipse STS 4.17 takes 96 % processor time on Intel i9 (#934)
• (Spring Boot) fixed: BootLanguageServerBootApp class is taking all available cpu continuously (#932)
• (Spring Boot) fixed: OpenRewrite unchecked, but always Language Server Background Job(Loading Rewrite Recipes) (#925)
• (Spring Boot) fixed: [validation] spring.factories EnableAutoConfiguration key for boot 3.0 ignores 'on' setting (#917)
• (VSCode) fixed: [vscode] Boot LS is broken if Java LS launch mode is 'Hybrid' (#919)
…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.17.0 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

major changes to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

• updated to Eclipse 2022-12 release (new and noteworthy)

early access to new experimental features

Among a number of bug fixes and minor improvements, this release introduces experimental support for:

• Spring Boot version validations: The IDE will tell you when there is a newer major, minor, or patch version available for your Spring Boot project
• Spring Boot upgrade support: The tooling will help you upgrading your existing projects to newer Spring Boot versions, including upgrades to newer patch and minor versions, as well as newer major versions (e.g. upgrading to Spring Boot 3)
• Spring specific validations and refactorings: The…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.16.1 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

major changes to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

• early access builds available for Spring Tools 4 on Eclipse 2022-12 milestones

important note for upgrading from a release prior to 4.16.0 on Eclipse

• If you are upgrading an existing Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution 4.15.3 or older to 4.16.1, please take a look at the necessary manual steps described for the upgrade to 4.16.0.

fixes and improvements

• (Spring Boot) fixed: Spring XML Config support does not show symbols with scope "File" (#860)
• (Spring Boot) fixed: [open-rewrite] exception when executing quick fix for project (#853)
• (Spring Boot) fixed: [refactoring] quick fix to convert autowired field to constructor param shows up even if the constructor param already exists (#815)
• (VSCode) fixed: Vscode Spring Boot Tools 1.39.0 prevents Java project from Running/Debugging (#847)
• (Eclipse) fixed: Web Tools Platform (WTP) validation is activated by default (#859)
• (Eclipse) fixed: ask user to save dirty editors before deploying on docker (#803…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.16.0 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

major changes to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

• updated to Eclipse 2022-09 release (new and noteworthy)
• new distribution build for Linux on ARM included now (experimental) - downloads are here
• m2e 2.0.5 release included in distribution builds for Eclipse

important note for upgrading from a previous installation on Eclipse

• Due to the major update to m2e 2.0 that comes with the Eclipse 2022-09 release, several additional third-party m2e connector extensions that the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution had installed in the past are no longer compatible. This prevents the automatic update of installations of Spring Tools prior to 4.16.0 to the new release. There are two options how to mitigate this:
  • start with a fresh install of Spring Tools 4.16.0 for Eclipse
  • go to the Preferences -> Installation Details and uninstall the following features via the Uninstall button, then restart the IDE, do a Check for Updates, and do the upgrade.
    • Maven Integration for Eclipse JDT Annotation Processor Toolkit
    • m2e connector for mavenarchiver pom properties
    • m2e connector for build-helper-maven-plugin
  …

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.15.3 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

fixes and improvements

• (Spring Boot) fixed: Spring Boot Tools slow down code complete (#808)
• (Language Server) fixed: Copied files should retain copyright ownership (#807)

To download the distribution for Eclipse and find links to the marketplace entries for Visual Studio Code and Theia, please go visit:

• Spring Tools 4: https://spring.io/tools/

Detailed changes can be found here: https://github.com/spring-projects/sts4/wiki/Changelog#2022-08-11-4153-release…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.15.2 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

fixes and improvements

• (Spring Boot) fixed: Validation errors on @@ placeholders in YAML editor (#711)
• (VSCode) fixed: Live process is not auto connected when app is launched in internalConsole (#794)
• (Eclipse) fixed: Cleanup / reduce verbosity of diagnostic output in Eclipse logs (#798)
• (Eclipse) fixed: Not properly disposed SWT resource was caused Spring Starter Project (#797)
• (Eclipse) fixed: avoid live hover connection attempt when deploying app to docker without actuator (#716)
• (Eclipse) fixed: Devtools integration with boot dash docker is broken (#724)
• (Eclipse) fixed: Pause / Resume for docker boot dash malfunctions (#783…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.15.1 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

fixes and improvements

• (Spring Boot) fixed: VScode incorrectly suggests removing @Autowired annotation from methods (#787)
• (Spring Boot) fixed: VScode quick fix should not suggest removing @Autowired annotation from JUnit tests (#786)
• (Eclipse) fixed: Not able to extract the new version of spring-tool-suite-4-4.15.0.RELEASE-e4.24.0-win32.win32.x86_64.self-extracting.jar on windows 11 (#788)
• (Eclipse) fixed: Cannot open Spring Boot Language Server Java Editor settings menu (#789)
…

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.15.0 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

major changes to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

• updated to Eclipse 2022-06 release (new and noteworthy)

fixes and improvements

• (Spring Boot) fixed: vscode-sts: an edge case of workspace symbol for @PutMapping (#781)
• (VSCode) fixed: Failed to refresh live data from process 12704 - com.xxxx.xx.xxx.BillingServiceApp after retries: 10 (#748)
• (Eclipse) fixed: The Spring Boot Language Server is not immediately shutdown after closing the last open editor to avoid the need to restart the server when you open the next file (related to #568)
• (Eclipse) fixed: When opening symbols, open the compilation unit from the relevant project (#769)
• (Eclipse) fixed: The issue with…

On August 31 of 2004, only a few months after version 1.0 of the Spring Framework itself got released, Torsten Jürgeleit created a repository and made the initial commits to a project that became the tooling support for Spring in Eclipse, the Spring IDE project (while the roots of that work are probably going back further in time, as the comment of the first commit to the repository reads like there was a CVS repository even before that time.). Shortly after, Christian Dupuis joined, led the project for many years and initiated the Spring Tool Suite on top of Spring IDE.

It’s been a long time…