Interface21 has partnered with Tasktop Technologies, creators of the Eclipse Mylyn project, to develop the Spring Tool Suite. This new Spring-specific tool solution will build on Eclipse and Mylyn to dramatically reduce the complexity of enterprise Java application development and maintenance.

When used for large enterprise applications, integrated development environments (IDEs) flood developers with tens of thousands of artifacts, wasting productive time by forcing developers to constantly find and identify the information relevant to the task at hand. In addition, the enterprise developer’s IDE consists of many tools that do not provide a unified workflow. While the Spring Framework and Portfolio projects already integrate many key technologies at the framework and library level, there is currently no tool solution that provides Mylyn’s task focus, tool integration, and workflow streamlining benefits to enterprise application developers. Building on the existing success of Eclipse, Mylyn and Spring IDE, the Spring Tool Suite will simplify the large aggregation of tools used to develop complex enterprise Java applications, reducing information overload and streamlining developer workflow.

The Spring Tool Suite will also offer:

• Support for the latest Spring 2.0 features, including namespace-based configurations
• Support for Spring Web Flow, including an extension to WTP’s XML editor for content assist, hyperlinking, validation, and graphical editing
• Tools for Spring AOP-based development, including support for validating configurations and visualization of cross-cutting references
• Support for Spring Java configuration