From STS, I'm trying to load and run the ProSpring3 project provided by the author of the APress Pro Spring 3 book. I get the latest STS from springsource.org (This is spring-tool-suite-3.1.0.RELEASE-e4.2-win32-x86_64-installer.exe). It installs and seems to operate OK. On my Win 7 PC I set up permissions, env vars, etc. to get files to copy OK and let maven run right.

Now get the project from https://github.com/prospring3/springblog. It downloads as a ZIP, and I install the code in my projects directory. STS says that this is some sort of an old project that needs conversion, and I let it.

I try to update the project, or perhaps run it in the server. Complaints about missing JAR files -- about 80. The ones it wants are in the .m2 directory. Here is a sample of the errors:

Error reading file C:\Users\Jerome\.m2\repository\org\springframework \spring-context\3.1.0.RELEASE\spring-context-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar C:\Users\Jerome\.m2\repository\org\springframework \spring-context\3.1.0.RELEASE\spring-context-3.1.0.RELEASE.jar (The system cannot find the file specified)

So I figure, updating dependencies OUGHT to be easy, because that is why I'm using this stack of software, right? And perhaps if I change the release to 3.1.1.RELEASE, because that is the version I seem to have, then something (Maven? Roo?) will start automatically fixing things for me. Not working that way for me, so far. I think that the directory is missing every JAR file.

I went to github.com to find a version of the spring-samples that include the Pet Clinic. I found one, but it insisted on stuff like "3.0.5.RELEASE".

Is it true that whenever I get an updated version of the Spring libraries I'll break about 50-100 lines of each project I write?

There ought to be an easy way of saying "make this project use the up-to-date version of Spring that I have". Otherwise, I'm looking to my disk to find my installed versions and then patching a XML file. Then if I update the library I'm updating that file again, up to 80 times.

What am I missing here?