Spring Tools, a collection of helpers for developers who want to build Java applications with the Spring app framework, has received an update and is now available in v4.2. The new version should above all work faster than its predecessors and free Eclipse users from some bugs.

One of the new features is a way to pass arguments for virtual machines to the PropertiesLauncher process to customise things like the garbage collector. Users have to add system properties to their eclipse.ini or SpringToolSuite4.ini to set those VM arguments for the language server, with individual arguments comma separated.

To improve performance in general, created symbols are now cached across language server starts in the symbol indexing infrastructure. On top of that internal type indexing has been replaced by communication to the language server. This should keep time and memory use down for those keeping their own type indexes.

The majority of changes beyond that cater to Eclipse users, for example Spring JMX is now enabled by default in the Spring Boot launch configurations. When editing Java source code, the language server should now be back in sync for actions like live hovers, and navigation to bean types and resources is supposed to work better again. The distribution also works with Eclipse 2019-03 now.

Spring Tools 4.x is developed by Pivotal and available for Visual Studio Code, Eclipse, and the Atom IDE. Another bug fix release is planned for the end of the month.
The Spring Framework is primarily meant for Java application development, but extensions for building web apps on the Java enterprise platform are available as well. Its source code can be found on GitHub under the Apache License 2.0. Spring Tools are on GitHub as well, but are protected under the Eclipse License.