Edit July 2011: It seems the springide.org address is back up and running again, please post a comment on this post and I’ll monitor the situation. As of today, you can do the following:
- Help/Install New Sofware
- Add… button, then “http://springide.org/updatesite” (without the quotes) for both the name and location
- Click “Core/Spring IDE”
- Click “Next”, “Next” and accept the licence, then finish.
On the Spring Fundamentals course, we look at the Spring IDE. The name is a bit misleading, it’s really just a plug in for Eclipse rather than a full blown IDE.
Nonetheless, it is still a powerful plug in. As well as validating your XML configuration (so you can trap wiring errors without running the application), you can also see a very well presented graph of your beans, making it very easy to spot wiring problems.
However, since we recorded the course the URL of the update site has changed (springide.org now gives 404 errors).
The correct update site is now https://dist.springframework.org/release/IDE.
(I should note that SpringSource, the company founded by the creators of the Spring Framework also supply a full IDE based around Spring and Eclipse called the SpringSource Tool Suite. We didn’t cover this on the course, so see https://www.springsource.com/products/sts for full details).