Just in time for the 2.0.3 release of Spring Web Flow we are proud to announce the availability of Spring IDE 2.1 bringing support for Web Flow 2 and Eclipse 3.4.
After the Ganymede release some users had problems installing Spring IDE 2.0.6 into their shiny new 3.4 packages. This was basically due to incompatibilities between Spring IDE’s Mylyn integration and the Mylyn 3.0 APIs which changed quite significantly. Thanks to a rapid pair programming session with Mik Kersten, lead of the Mylyn project at Eclipse, we were able to make Mylyn 3.0 support available just hours after the Ganymede launch from the Spring IDE nighty update site (It is so much fun sharing an office with the Tasktop crew. If you are ever in Vancouver make sure to drop by for a coffee). Obviously an nightly snapshot build is not everybody’s preferred installation source; therefore I’m more than happy to announce that version 2.1 is now officially compatible with Eclipse 3.4 and Mylyn 3.0.
Besides the usual bug fixing that goes into every release and the fore-mentioned Mylyn and Eclipse migration, 2.1 now supports Spring Web Flow 2. We have added support for visual editing using the graphical Web Flow Editor as well as support for validating and editing of the XML flow definition files based on the 2.0 XML schema. It is important to note that 2.1 does not break the Web Flow 1.x support. So all Web Flow 1.x users out there: it is safe to upgrade to Spring IDE 2.1.
Another feature, rather small but requested quite often, is the ability to display nested beans in the Beans Dependency Graph. See the following screenshot for an example.
As always the release is available from the update site hosted at Amazon S3. Here are the links:
- Update site: http://dist.springframework.org/release/IDE (this link does not work in a browser, but in your Eclipse update manager!)
- Archived update site: spring-ide_updatesite_2.1.0_v200808011800.zip
- Changelog: Release 2.1
In closing I would like to mention that Spring IDE 2.1 serves as the foundation for the upcoming SpringSource Tool Suite 1.1 and SpringSource Application Platform Tools 1.0 release (later next week). Over the last months we have added extension points and APIs to Spring IDE that provide some nice and supported ways of extending the Spring structure model provided by Spring IDE.
