STS vs. Eclipse benefits comparison

[sleyzerzon]

Hi,

I need to advocate to the management and the powers that be at work (large financial institution) a switch from an Eclipse-based (with Spring & other plugins) to STS environment.

I'm wondering if there exist some slides (or other resources) that would comprehensively itemize and compare the benefits to a developer of SpringSource Toolsuite vs. doing the same thing in Eclipse (with Spring plugins installed). Are there any differences (both from usage and maintenance perspective) between 2 approaches, what would be the recommended (preferred) way?

We are using Spring Batch & Integration libraries in the projects quite extensively, we are planning to move to some PaaS solution in the future (maybe CloudFoundry).

What comes to mind are single click Cloudfoundry deployment, Spring Integration visualizations, Mylyn integration. Would those be still available under installing STS specific plugins to Eclipse? Maven comes prepackaged with STS as far as I know but not so with Eclipse, anything else? What would be the migration path between the new releases of STS under two alternative approaches?

Thank you in advance.
Simeon

[Martin Lippert]

Hi Simeon!

Let me try to help you here. Basically you can get all the tooling features from STS installed into an existing Eclipse installation from a number of update sites or the Eclipse Marketplace. So you can end-up having the same features in STS and your existing Eclipse installation after installing the STS features into it.

However, the STS distribution comes with a ready-to-use installation of Eclipse. That means STS...

- ... has the full Eclipse JEE distribution inside
- ... comes with Maven, Spring Roo and tc Server developer edition pre-packaged and pre-configured (you can start using tc Server or Spring Roo right away without the need to download or configure them manually)
- ... comes with additional components pre-installed, like the Maven Integration for Eclipse (including the Maven Eclipse integration for WTP, AJDT and Groovy/Grails)

Its just a lot easier to use and to start with, because you can download the STS distribution, install it, start it - and you are ready to go for the most common Spring project scenarios. Using plain Eclipse you would need to install the Spring tooling (Spring IDE + STS components) from the Marketplace, install the other mentioned add-ons manually from their update sites, download the necessary runtime components (Roo or tc Server), configure them, etc.

HTH,
Martin

[tony_k]

i have some questions along those lines. i am trying to pitch to my organization the benefits of STS for tomcat-type development, and oddly i found my self not entirely able to answer some obvious questions:

(1) is STS open source?

i know eclipse is open source, wtp, spring-ide, grails-ide, etc. but if someone were to ask me if STS is open source would it be accurate to say yes? is the sum of the parts open-source? of course i would be out of my mind to attempt this, but if i wanted to recreate STS from source is it possible? this is really a legal question that the 'rules' people ask in my organization.

(2) can i get paid support for STS from vm-ware (or other)?

if so the open source question may become moot if the product can be purchased with support from a third-party. ironically, sometimes 'free' has bad connotations in corporate america

[ronwheeler]

We moved from Eclipse to STS a few years ago and the saving in time and aggravation was tremendous.
It used to take between hours and days to get a new version of Eclipse properly configured with all the right versions of the plug-ins. A simple error on our part or on the part of the person packaging the plug-in could result in all kinds of completely non-productive hours trying to find a working combination of plug-ins.

Since we moved to Eclipse, upgrading has been simple. One download, an install, Subversion screwing about and you are ready to run.
The only flaw in the ointment is Subversion because of licensing and policies but even that has been simplified under STS.

We are now able to keep up to date with Eclipse releases. The risk of losing a lot of productive development hours and missing short-term deadlines because of an Eclipse upgrade prevented us from staying current in the past.

In addition, we now know that everyone has the same Eclipse configuration. With Eclipse/STS, when you try to explain some development procedure or help someone doing a new development task, you will not have the surprises that sometime occured with Eclipse when the person was missing a plug-in or had a different version.


Ron

Hi Simeon!

Let me try to help you here. Basically you can get all the tooling features from STS installed into an existing Eclipse installation from a number of update sites or the Eclipse Marketplace. So you can end-up having the same features in STS and your existing Eclipse installation after installing the STS features into it.

However, the STS distribution comes with a ready-to-use installation of Eclipse. That means STS...

- ... has the full Eclipse JEE distribution inside
- ... comes with Maven, Spring Roo and tc Server developer edition pre-packaged and pre-configured (you can start using tc Server or Spring Roo right away without the need to download or configure them manually)
- ... comes with additional components pre-installed, like the Maven Integration for Eclipse (including the Maven Eclipse integration for WTP, AJDT and Groovy/Grails)

Its just a lot easier to use and to start with, because you can download the STS distribution, install it, start it - and you are ready to go for the most common Spring project scenarios. Using plain Eclipse you would need to install the Spring tooling (Spring IDE + STS components) from the Marketplace, install the other mentioned add-ons manually from their update sites, download the necessary runtime components (Roo or tc Server), configure them, etc.

HTH,
Martin

[Martin Lippert]

Hey!

(1) is STS open source?

We are making the IDE itself completely open-source at the moment. You might have seen some of those projects already apprearing at GitHub under EPL license.

If you take a look at the distribution, it comes with some ready-to-use runtime components in addition to the pure IDE (Spring Roo, tc Server Developer Edition). You don't need to install them if you want to use STS, but you can. And the tc Server Developer Edition is not open-source as far as I know. It is available under a commercial license.

But STS itself (so the IDE) will be completely open-source.

(2) can i get paid support for STS from vm-ware (or other)?

You can get the vFabric Developer Support, which includes support for the SpringSource Tool Suite.
http://www.vmware.com/support/servic...developer.html

HTH,
Martin