Spring IDE is a set of Eclipse plugins packaged as a feature. This feature is hosted on a website (aka updatesite) which is accessed by Eclipse’s update manager. To use Spring IDE’s BeansXmlEditor the Web Standard Tools (WST) project (see below) is required.
The following instructions describe how to install Spring IDE together with GEF via Eclipse’s update manager:
Open Eclipse. Go to Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install.
Select “Search for new features to install”. Click “Next”.
Click “New Remote Site”. Enter “Spring IDE updatesite” for the Name and “http://springide.org/updatesite/” for the URL (Screenshot). Click “OK”.
You should now see a a new entry name “Spring IDE updatesite” with a mark next to it (Screenshot). Click on that and check “Spring IDE”.
Click on the mark next to “Eclipse.org updatesite” and check the version of GEF which is sufficient for your version of Eclipse. Click “Next”.
Select the features “Graphical Editing Framework” and the latest version of “Spring IDE” from the list. Click “Next”.
Check “I accept…” and click “Next”. Select or add the appropriate site to install the features. Click “Finish”.
Click Install on the warning dialogs during feature verification (both features are not digitally signed).
After successfully downloading and installing the features click “Yes” on the “Would you like to restart now?” dialog.
Congratulations. You have made it!
After restarting Eclipse you can check if Spring IDE is available by opening Eclipse’s about dialog (Screenshot) and clicking on the Spring logo.
Required Software
Eclipse 3.1 (or newer) is required to run Spring IDE with it’s basic features (BeansView, BeansConfigValidator, BeansSearch). For Spring IDE’s BeansGraph you have to install the corresponding version of Eclipse’s Graphical Editing Framework (GEF).
To use the more advanced features of Spring IDE (BeansXmlEditor, WebFlowEditor) the Web Standard Tools (WST) project is required. WST itself has strict requirements, e.g. for version 1.0.x these are as follows:
Eclipse 3.1.x
GEF 3.1.x
EMF/SDO/XSD 2.1.x
JEM 1.1.0.x
You can download WST and all required packages manually from here or use Eclipse’s update manager as described here.
Alternate Types of Installation
Installation of Spring IDE with required dependecies from the Callisto Discovery Site
If you already have Eclipse 3.2 installed then you can also use Eclipse’s update manager to install Spring IDE with all required features from the Callisto Discovery Site. A detailed description is available in the wiki page SpringideCallistoInstall.
Installation of archived version of Spring IDE’s update site
An archived version of the update site (springide_updatesite_x.x.x.zip) can also be downloaded from http://springide.org/updatesite/ and used locally with Eclipse’s update manager. Do not unzip these archives into your Eclipse installation directory. This will destroy your Eclipse installation!
There is also a developer updatesite available where you can install development versions of Spring IDE from. The procedure to install from the dev updatesite is the same as described above; expect that you have to use http://springide.org/updatesite_dev/ as URL.
Previous releases of Spring IDE (starting with v1.1) can be installed from the updatesite http://springide.org/updatesite_old/.
