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