SpringSource Tool Suite(STS) - worth it?

Question

I finally decided to give SpringSource Tool Suite(STS) a try this morning, only to find that it is not compatible with the current version of Eclipse I'm using.(3.6)

So, before making another attempt, I thought I would asks you guys if it's worth getting it.

Usually I'm not a big fan of adding a heavy weight plug-in like STS to my Eclipse IDE because of compatibility and upgrade issues, but the amount of XML I'll have to write kind of scared me, so that's why I made an exception to it.

Does STS indeed make your programming experience with Spring much easier, or can you make do without it? Also how stable is it? For example, I had a few crashes while using the JPA feature of the Eclipse JEE and I'm not using it any more because of that.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I think IntelliJ has it all over Eclipse in every respect, but especially in Spring support. It's well worth the money.

Answer 2

I use SpringSource Tool Suite for my development involving Spring and Spring DM, basically because all the needed plug-ins and spring-dm server are included in the package and make the setup of the environment easy.

What is especially useful to me, are the different wizards that provide additional help when creating and modifying Spring based projects.

Regarding the stability I didn't have any issues when working with JPA but it maybe depend on the exact versions you used. Overall the issues I encountered were the same you also encounter in "standard" Eclipse installations.