What is Spring Project Nature?

I have a project that was created in Eclipse, but I'd like to use SpringSource's STS IDE now. I have the Java project in STS now and I converted the project to a Maven project to get Maven's support.

Question

What exactly does the "Add Spring Project Nature" feature do? What is it's purpose? Is it necessary to make a project in STS spring aware?

Hey!

The purpose of the "Spring Project Nature" is to enable more advanced Spring tooling within your IDE for that project, like validation, spring explorer visualization, etc. Usually, when working with Spring projects, you should enable the Spring project nature on those projects. After that you can configure the exact features using the project properties for that project (under the "Spring" category).

HTH,
Martin