In the light of the new major releases of the Spring Framework and Spring Boot, the next major release of the Spring Tools is also around the corner. The GA is scheduled for December 10th and RCs will start to show up from now onwards.

Support for what is new in Spring

Spring Tools 5 contains support for various new features of Spring Framework 7 and Spring Boot 4, ranging from extensive support for the new API versioning feature, support for functional bean definitions via the new bean registrar API, semi-automatic configuration for JSpecify annotation based null analysis and support for AOT repositories in Spring Data. So let’s take a look into the details here.

Support for API versioning

Spring Framework 7 introduced support for API versioning when building server-side web endpoints as well as accessing web resources on the client side. The Spring Tools 5 introduces support for this via:

• Showing a codelens on top of controllers to give you a quick overview and summary of the web configuration (whether it comes from java web config or from boot properties)

• The version attribute shows up as part of request mapping symbols (to help you get an overview of the mappings for different versions as well as allow you to navigate to a specific mapping easily)
• Validation to check if a versioning strategy is configured (when detecting the version attribute on mappings)

• Validation to check whether the mentioned version is syntactically correct (in case the default versioning format is configured)
• Validation to check several conditions for the strategy configuration (path segment is not mixed with other strategies, strategy is not configured multiple times, etc.)

Support for bean registrars

Functional bean definitions have been improved quite a bit in Spring Framework 7. The new bean registrar mechanism allows you to programmatically define beans in a more structured way. Spring Tools 5 understands these bean definitions in the same way as other bean definitions in your source code and shows those bean definitions among others - just as you would expect. Whether you hit content-assist on a @DependsOn annotation value or want to quickly navigate to a specific bean definition, beans defined via bean registrars will show up automatically.

Support for AOT repositories

Spring Data 2025.1 introduced ahead of time compiled repositories. While those repositories come with a number of benefits at startup and runtime, they also allow the tooling to show details about the queries directly in the source code. This extra information, for example, shows you the precise SQL query that will be generated by Spring Data for a repository method, giving you insights into how query methods turn into SQL queries.

In addition to the codelens showing you details of the generated query statements, the integration for AOT repositories also lets you jump from the repository interface definition directly to the generated source code for the repository, or quickly turn the generated SQL query into a @Query annotation.

The tooling uses metadata that Spring Data produces while generating the source code for the repository ahead of time during the build process. This also means that the visualized information is not necessarily in-sync with the code that you see in the editor. You can update the AOT metadata (and therefore the code lens) either by running the build of the project or via using the code lens to refresh the AOT metadata only.

Automatic configuration for JSpecify annotations

The java compiler used inside of the various environments the Spring Tools are built for (including Visual Studio Code, Cursor, Eclipse, and more) is already capable of running extensive annotation-based null analysis. But you need to tell the compiler which annotations to take into account for this analysis. The Spring Tools 5 distribution for Eclipse configures the JSpecify annotations automatically. As a user, you only need to enable the annotation-based null analysis in the preferences. The upcoming versions of the Java support for Visual Studio Code, Cursor, and Theia will also have the JSpecify annotations pre-configured and ready to use. In those environments, a popup will ask you to enable the analysis, if those annotations are on the classpath of your project.

Looking forward

If you want to try the latest release candidates of Spring Tools 5, please go to the tools preview page or switch to the pre-releases of the extensions in Visual Studio Code.

In upcoming parts of this Spring Tools 5 blog series, we will take a look at the new stereotype-based logical structure view, and get a glimpse at how Spring Tools integrate with AI tools, followed by the GA of the Spring Tools 5. Stay tuned.