Eclipse Spring IDE 2.3.2 plug-in vs. SpringSource Tool Suite 2.3.2

Question

I'd like to play around with Spring for an upcoming JEE project. Is there any difference between the Eclipse Spring IDE 2.3.2 plug-in (in the new Eclipse Marketplace) and the SpringSource Tool Suite (available at SpringSource).

More precisely: In my understanding, the Tool Suite is basically Eclipse 3.5 with a set of plug-ins. So the question is, are the plug-ins provided by the Eclipse Spring IDE 2.3.2 the same or is there any difference in functionality?

Thanks for your help, I hope you understand that the Eclipse platform can be overwhelming for beginners.

Answer 1

SpringSource ToolSuite is Eclipse + Spring IDE + others. The others are things like support for Roo, dmServer, tcServer, Grails, etc.

If all you need is the Spring IDE plugin (which gives support for Spring Framework development), then vanilla Eclipse + Spring IDE is going to be enough.

I quite like the pre-bundled STS versions, though, it's one less thing to worry about.

Answer 2

Even though you can use just Eclipse + Spring IDE plugin, I would suggest going for SpringSource Tool Suite simply because it is stable set of very useful plugins. Since we switched to STS we never looked back :)