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Captain Man
Captain Man

Reputation: 7695

What is the difference between Eclipse with Spring IDE plugin and Spring Tool Suite alone?

What's the difference between these

I ask because STS says it's built on top of Eclipse, and I wonder what differences it has over simply using a plugin that adds similar functionality to "vanilla" Eclipse.

Upvotes: 48

Views: 67669

Answers (3)

BlueMice
BlueMice

Reputation: 333

There is already an article about this in DZone Spring IDE and the Spring Tool Suite - Using Spring in Eclipse.

While the Spring IDE project provides a set of plugins for the Eclipse IDE, the Spring Tool Suite comes as a ready-to-use distribution of the latest Eclipse releases with the Spring IDE components pre-installed. This includes the tc Server integration for Eclipse (another IDE extension that is provided by Pivotal as an open-source project) and various other additions to Eclipse that turn the pure Eclipse IDE into a ready-to-use, best-of-breed environment for enterprise Spring application development.

Upvotes: 1

Mandy
Mandy

Reputation: 173

Spring Tool suite has ready to go features specially designed to spring supported projects and cloud environment. And Eclipse is more generic where we've to add the plugins and extensions for our platform setup.

Upvotes: 1

Leandro Carracedo
Leandro Carracedo

Reputation: 7345

It's true, STS is built on top of Eclipse. The difference is only related to another products support from the STS installation, like Roo, Pivotal tc Server, Cloud Foundry and getting started guides, but you could also include this features in your Eclipse installation.

So STS gives a complete solution around Spring features and simplifies the developer environment install, that's the key difference.

As Martin Lippert explains in the forums:

"So you can end-up having the same features in STS and your existing Eclipse installation after installing the STS features into it."

You could find more details on the Spring forums.

Details on features: STS features and Spring IDE plugin features.

Upvotes: 29

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