Spring Framework - Eclipse/STS Project Import Guide

This document will guide you through the process of importing the Spring Framework projects into Eclipse or the Spring Tool Suite (STS). It is recommended that you have a recent version of Eclipse or STS. As a bare minimum you will need Eclipse with full Java 8 support, the AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT), and the Groovy Compiler.

The following instructions have been tested against Spring Tool Suite (STS) 3.9.4 and 4.0.0.M11 with Eclipse Buildship (Eclipse Plug-ins for Gradle). The instructions should work with the latest Eclipse distribution as long as you install Buildship. Note that STS 4 comes with Buildship preinstalled.

Steps

Within your locally cloned spring-framework working directory:

1. Precompile spring-oxm with ./gradlew :spring-oxm:compileTestJava
2. Import into Eclipse (File -> Import -> Gradle -> Existing Gradle Project -> Navigate to directory -> Select Finish)
3. If prompted, exclude the spring-aspects module (or after the import by closing or deleting the project)
4. In the spring-oxm project, add the two folders (castor and jaxb) in build/generated-sources to the build path (right click on them and select Build Path -> Use as Source Folder)
5. To apply project specific settings run ./gradlew eclipseBuildship
6. Code away

Known Issues

1. spring-core and spring-oxm should be pre-compiled due to repackaged dependencies.

• See *RepackJar tasks in the build.

2. spring-aspects does not compile due to references to aspect types unknown to Eclipse.

• If you install AJDT into Eclipse it should work.

3. While JUnit tests pass from the command line with Gradle, some may fail when run from the IDE.

• Resolving this is a work in progress.
• If attempting to run all JUnit tests from within the IDE, you will likely need to set the following VM options to avoid out of memory errors: -XX:MaxPermSize=2048m -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxHeapSize=2048m

Tips

In any case, please do not check in your own generated .classpath file, .project file, or .settings folder. You'll notice these files are already intentionally in .gitignore. The same policy holds for IDEA metadata.