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 ARE NOT supported in Spring Tools 4 anymore:

• Spring XML config support (including auto-completion for bean IDs, bean classes, etc.)
• Spring XML config validations

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.