Spring Tool Suite & Groovy/Grails Tool Suite 3.6.1: New and Noteworthy

General Updates

Pivotal tc Server Developer Edition updated to 3.0.0

STS and GGTS now ship with the latest Pivotal tc Server Developer Edition 3.0.0.

Spring Tooling

Performance improvements

Thanks to Ian Brandt and the support from YourKit we were able to identify additional performance issues and bottlenecks. While the work on those performance issues continues, we were able to deliver a number of performance improvements in 3.6.1 already. Builds (full builds as well as incremental builds) of Spring projects are much faster now.

AspectJ

Annotation Processing

AspectJ now supports annotation processing in either batch mode (on the command line) or in the IDE. This blog post shows how to use annotation processors in your AspectJ projects in Eclipse.

Groovy Eclipse

Fixes!

Groovy-Eclipse has had numerous fixes go in since the GGTS 3.6.0 release. The full list is accessible here.


Miscellaneous

Issues resolved in this release

Here is a full list of resolved bugs and enhancement requests for 3.6.1:

STS/GGTS issue tracker

Spring IDE issue tracker

Groovy-Eclipse issue tracker


Useful Links

Download STS: https://spring.io/tools/sts/all

Download GGTS: https://spring.io/tools/ggts/all

STS/GGTS forum: https://forum.spring.io/forum/spring-projects/springsource-tool-suite

STS/GGTS Issue tracker: https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS


Known issues in this release

Mac OSX app signing not yet updated for 10.9.5 and 10.10

The OSX platform specific signing of the STS and GGTS Mac apps is not yet updated to a Mavericks infrastructure. Therefore running STS/GGTS on OSX 10.9.5 and OSX 10.10 will cause Gatekeeper to complain about STS/GGTS. In that case, please go to the System Preferences -> Security and start STS/GGTS there (if you tried before, you will see a button to start the last app). Once you started STS/GGTS at least once successfully, OSX will remember your decision about this app and will not ask you again.


Check for Updates throws an error when updating from STS 3.5.1

Doing a "Check for Updates" of STS to an existing installation throws an error about a problem with the Groovy-Eclipse JDT patch feature. In that case, disable the Groovy-Eclipse JDT patch feature from the list of components to update and continue. This happens on the Eclipse 4.3 platform only. If you upgrade from STS 3.6.0 on Eclipse 4.4, you will not hit this problem.


Dashboard and Retina Displays

When running STS/GGTS on top of a JDK7, the new dashboard looks a bit blurry when using a HiRes (Retina) display, for example on a Retina MacBook Pro. This is due to the underlying browser technology that is used to display the dashboard content and that is coming from JavaFX. The JavaFX version that ships with JDK7 doesn't support retina displays. The solution for this is to run STS/GGTS on top of a JDK8 build. The JavaFX version that comes with JDK8 supports retina displays.


Setting the JDK

STS and GGTS requires a JDK to run on top of. Nevertheless the native launcher component might pick up a JRE automatically if you don't specifiy which JDK to run STS/GGTS on top of. To avoid this, you can specify the JDK in the sts.ini file that comes with your STS/GGTS installation. Add a line at the beginning "-vm" and an additional line below that which points to the "javaw" executable of the JDK on your machine.


Issues on Linux (GTK3)

Eclipse 4.4, upon which STS and GGTS are based, is the first Eclipse release where GTK3 is the default for the SWT widget library. There are some issues with this still:

You may also experience other UI rendering glitches. If you exprience any of these problems you can avoid them by forcing SWT to switch back to using GTK2. Just set the environment variable "SWT_GTK3=0" before launching STS or GGTS.


New and Noteworthy for previous releases

STS/GGTS 3.6.0

STS/GGTS 3.5.1

STS/GGTS 3.4.0

STS/GGTS 3.3.0

STS/GGTS 3.2.0

STS/GGTS 3.1.0

STS/GGTS 3.0.0

STS 2.9.2

STS 2.8.1

STS 2.7.2

STS 2.6.1.SR1

STS 2.5.2.SR1