How do Spring Developers Develop Spring?

[doughaber]

Hi All,

It seems like most Spring projects are hosted on GitHub and I assume most spring developers (by which I mean either employees or contributors) use STS for development. But where does it go from there?

1. Do devs use their own GitHub fork? Commit directly to the real repository?

2. How do devs pull GitHub projects in locally?
eGit plugin? command line?

3. Once devs have the project locally, how does it get into STS?
gradlew eclipse? Import Maven project? Something else?

4. Some projects are gradle and some are maven. How do devs get them to play nice?
gradlew install? Something else?

5. Any other tips or tricks?

Thanks!
Doug

[Chris Beams]

Hi Doug,

Answers to these questions vary across projects and across individual developers.

* Most committers do in fact use STS, a few use IDEA. Everyone is free to use the tools that best suit them.

1. Most committers push directly against the main project repository under the SpringSource org at GitHub

2. Some committers may use EGit, but to varying degrees. I don't have deep knowledge of every committer's habits here. I personally use EGit in a pretty passive fashion, managing most git operations at the command line, but letting EGit handle things like renames and deletes in an intelligent fashion.

3. `./gradlew eclipse`, then STS->File->Import->Import existing project, per the spring-framework README

4. This is an area of imperfect integration right now. When this is necessary, sometimes `./gradlew install` is enough; sometimes I (and I assume others) will manually set up the Eclipse classpath to include projects directly. We hope to see more advanced support out of the STS Gradle tooling soon; this is somewhat dependent on improvements in Gradle's own tooling API, however.

5. Read Spring Framework's building from source instructions [1] and the Gradle build and release FAQ [2] if you haven't already. Much of the latter is targeted toward Spring project leads, but has sections that are generally useful as well.

[1]: https://github.com/SpringSource/spri...ng-from-source
[2]: https://github.com/SpringSource/spri...nd-release-FAQ