Monday, April 22, 2013

Spring Integration STS Templates Updated - 1.0.0.M5

We are proud to announce a new milestone release of the Spring Integration Templates version 1.0.0.M5 for Spring Tool Suite (STS). This release brings numerous fixes and enhancements as detailed below. If you are using the latest version of STS version 3.2, the updated templates are automatically available to you. Just press the "Refresh" button under File --> New --> Spring Template Project.



If you are not fully familiar with the STS Template support, please see the original blog post including screencast at:


In this new release, we have updated the templates to the latest Spring Integration version (2.2.3.RELEASE). Also, all templates will now warn if either the Maven support or the Gradle support are not available in the respective Eclipse environment. 

In particular, we made numerous improvements to the War template as well as the Adapter template.

Spring Integration War Template

The War template now provides a much better (prettier) UI using Bootstrap. If you have not used Bootstrap, yet - It is basically the new UI baseline. It is very simple to use and even prototypes, presentation demos etc. shall not look like 1990s websites any longer. 

The updated template also uses wro4j to provide more efficient bundling and minifiacation of CSS and JavaScript resources. This allows the War template to achieve a fairly decent YSlow rating of 97.


Spring Integration Adapter Template

Another area of improvements for this release was the Adapter Template. In 2012, we introduced the Spring Integration Extensions project, to further encourage community contributions to the Spring Integration project. In order to improve the starting experience, we also introduced the Spring Integration Adapter Template for STS back then.



For a detailed overview, please checkout the original blog post introducing the Spring Integration Extensions project as well the Adapter Template:


For the 1.0.0.M5 milestone, we upgraded the project to Gradle 1.5 and also upgraded all project dependencies to the latest release. As a minor enhancement, the user provided version number will now also set the version numbers for the XML Schemas (Which provide the XML namespace support). 

I hope that the Spring Integration STS Templates are helpful to you, be it while learning and exploring Spring Integration, to kickstart new Spring Integration projects or to start developing new extensions for Spring Integration. If you see any issues, please let us know either in Jira or the community forums.