SpringSource bounces out new tools for starting projects



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March 17, 2009 —  Beneath the mattress on which corporate Java applications rest are many Springs. SpringSource updated a number of those metaphorically compressed tension coils today, such as SpringSource Tool Suite 2.0 and numerous contributions to the updated open-source Groovy on Grails stack. At the heart of these updates are tools and templates designed to relieve the initial heavy lifting involved in getting a Spring project off of the ground.

Christian Dupuis, principal software engineer at SpringSource, said that the primary focus for SpringSource Tool Suite 2.0 was saving developers' time. “Our customers usually spend quite a bit of time in the beginning of their projects getting started in the IDE,” he said.

“What we do in [the tool suite] is provide project jump-starts. [The suite] guides users through a bunch of questions depending on the template they've chosen. It asks if you want to use Web 2.0 technologies, or if you want to use Spring security to protect your application. In the end, we can create a bare-minimum project in Eclipse. Also, the dependencies are already managed for you.”

SpringSource Tool Suite 2.0 is available as an Eclipse plug-in or as a standalone Eclipse installation. Dupuis said that the tool set includes a new way to edit Spring XML configuration files. The suite can validate these XML files on the fly and offer suggestions for fixing troublesome configurations, just as the Eclipse IDE does for Java code, he said.

Dupuis also said that the release adds tight integrations with SpringSource's fledgling application server, dm. While those integrations do not extend to other application servers, dm users will be able to run their code and debug it within Eclipse, he pointed out.

Groovy times
Even though Joe Strummer is dead, Groovy Times are here again thanks to the work of the open-source communities around Grails and Groovy. Both projects are headed by SpringSource employees, but contributions are coming in from the community as well, said Peter Cooper-Ellis, senior vice president of engineering and product management at SpringSource.

For Grails 1.1 and Groovy 1.6, the focus was primarily on optimizations, said Cooper-Ellis. This scripting language and Web framework built on top of Java are now also OSGi-friendly. Aside from what he claims is a four-fold decrease in compile-time operations in this release, the Groovy on Grails team has also revised integrations with OSGi to make deployment and runtime modification of applications simpler. Additionally, the plug-in architecture for Groovy on Grails was revised in this release.

Cooper-Ellis said that the Groovy on Grails suite has seen around 70,000 downloads per month since its initial release in February of last year.

“These two projects are really focused on making developers more productive when building applications,” said Cooper-Ellis. “We're continuing to focus on the whole life cycle. You'll see [that] we'll be focused on provisioning and management and our server projects going forward.”




Related Search Term(s): Grails, Groovy, SpringSource, XML


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